The semiconductor industry has experienced a very fast technical development. Among all the semiconductor products, DRAM has led the process technology of semiconductor industry. DRAM is a standard product made by mass production, and hence cost is the most important competitive dimension. The cost of DRAM depends on the process technology. The importance of process technology is increasing year by year with ever-increasing design complexity of products.
Using the success case of one company's DRAM division, we extract the success factors of the process technology, and find out the types of the process technology development. With the result of the case analysis, we suggest a framework for effective management of the process technology.
The major factors of the process technology innovation are the design rule of the product and the size of wafer. To obtain competitive advantage, the case company has made a decision to use two distinguished types of innovations. One is upgrading the design rule only while the other is upgrading the product complexity and the wafer size at the same time. In process improvement efforts, we also identified two types of programs, namely, cost-improvement and quality-improvement. In DRAM production process, we found the cost type improvements are more important mainly because of the price decrease after market introduction.
Using the framework and the insights from the case study, we discuss some current issues related to the process innovation and improvement in semiconductor industry. The case company is considering the possibility of using outdated DRAM production lines for producing ASIC products. To support this change, we conclude that improvement efforts toward more process flexibility is one of the most important directions to pursue.
