An Explornary Study on Service Integrator in Engineering Chain of the Semiconductor Industry
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Lo, Chia-Wen
Abstract
Recent advances in process technology and design complexity have driven semiconductor industry structure from vertical disintegration to consolidation. Design houses are forced to spend more resources than ever before on cooperating with other firms to tape out new chips under the growing pressure of time-to-market. Meanwhile, EDA tool providers, SIP providers, design service provider, foundries, and assembly & testing houses require spending extra resources on more industry-wide consolidation activities to help design houses solve increasing design problems. To enhance the operation efficiency of the vertically disintegrated semiconductor industry, the study proposes a concept of “Service Integrator” based on the analysis of transaction costs and engineering chain management. The proposed Service Integrator is defined as one new business model, which coordinates data or resources from service providers to assist design house to design products and manage thengineering chain which involves the activities of design support, access to manufacturing and testing data, as well as constructing a reliable IT system. Emergence of Service Integrator decreases both design houses’ and service providers’transaction costs spent on consolidation activities and accomplish the goal of engineering chain management such as first tape-out success, design cycle time reduction, and rapid mass production etc. In addition, the study suggests that Service Integrator can be best run by 4 types of firms - design service provider, foundry, new type of firms evolving from design service teams inside foundry, and new type of firms merged together by designervice teams inside foundry and design service provider. In the early phase of development of Service Integrator, each service integrator will lead one foundry alliance to compete with another foundry alliance. In this study, 22 propositions and several business implications are concluded.
Subjects
Semiconductor Industry
Service Integrator
Engineering Chain
Transaction Cost
Type
thesis
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