Knowledge creation at semiconductor factories by user-oriented yield management system

This paper presents a method of creating and managing advanced engineering organizational knowledge. For a semiconductor manufacturer to remain competitive in the marketplace, it must have a highly effective semiconductor yield-management system (YMS). The construction and maintenance of such a YMS is a typical example of the creation and management of organizational engineering knowledge, and also an example of how to support it by information technology. This paper proposes a new concept-user-oriented engineering. User-oriented engineering is an approach based on the user-centric concept and end user programming, applying ontology and problem solving method, to optimize the end user's knowledge and to share the knowledge. YMSs based on user-oriented engineering (UO-YMS) have been developed and have been in operation in several semiconductor factories for several years. The tacit knowledge of expert engineers has been transformed into explicit knowledge, then shared by the organization and transformed into systemic knowledge. The result has been a reduction in yield -management tool development time, shorter yield analysis time required studying loss, and a greatly improved yield.