Manufacturing Service Provisioning Mechanism and Enablers in a Virtual Fab (2/2)

This second year research of virtual fab(VF) has two parts. One part enlarges the scope from foundry manufacturing service only in the first year to the role of VF in the evolution of the Intellectual property provider-Fabless-Foundry(IFF) business models. This study performs in-depth interview with engineers/managers of fabless design houses. IP companies and leading foundry fabs. Study results lead to a better understanding of why and how virtual design-manufacturing partners successfully work together in the semiconductoe inducstry. Future needs for service provisioning mechanism and enablers can also be forecasted. The second part investigates and develops some building blocks for intelligent manufacturing service provisioning: software agent-based knowledge engineering, ordinal optimization-based fast simulation for scheduling rule selection and dispatching of automatic material handling systen(AMHA) in 300mm fabs. All these research efforts have joint sponsorship by the industry.