Design for manufacturability: A key to semiconductor manufacturing excellence

This paper reviews measures of manufacturing excellence and presents a design-for-manufacturability (DFM) program organized around early design and manufacturing teamwork and the economic analysis of design options. Typical measures of manufacturing excellence for a semiconductor fabricator are expressed in terms of either operational or economic results. Those expressed in terms of operational results are independent of the product mix in the fabricator while those expressed in terms of economic results integrate both fabricator and product design attributes into a single parameter like revenue/wafer. Improvements in the operational measures of manufacturing excellence focus upon increases in capacity and throughput, defect density reductions, and cost containment. Improvements in the economic measures of manufacturing excellence must focus on both fabricator processing efficiency and the productivity of the design. Design-for-manufacturability practices can improve design productivity, time-to-market, and product performance and reliability by closely coupling semiconductor fabrication knowledge with product requirements during the initial phase of a product design. Every design decision produces both technical and economic consequences; understanding these consequences and using this knowledge in the design process to optimize product productivity and profitability is key to achieving manufacturing excellence for that product.