Semiconductor Industry

Confoe offers an array of products and capabilities that enable improved operational capability and predictability in the volatile semiconductor industry. Streamlined business processes within employee and adjacent organizations improve productivity for the tradesman, engineers, supervisors, and managers. In addition, Confoe minimizes the amount of administrative time spent interfacing with IT systems or waiting to work because of delays or communication issues. 

When Confoe supports a fab owner, all contractors and equipment suppliers are managed in Confoe’s integrated “one plan” project environment. Near real-time updates provide the fab owner, all subcontractors and equipment suppliers with daily status reports and work plans. These allow the entire team to react effectively to issues as they arise, and prevent future problems. As a result, resource utilization is dramatically improved and cycle time is reduced. 

Confoe provides solutions to one of the most challenging issues for capital equipment suppliers--peak resource requirements during industry upturns. We then expand to fully projectize all field and field support operations. By supporting more efficient use of existing resources, strategic outsourcing, and shorter time to competency for new hires, Confoe helps limit headcount during the upturn, and effectively minimizing fixed cost issues during the downturn. Confoe’s methodology aligns training, technical documentation, new product introduction and applications architecture to the ever evolving process of doing work. This yields continuous improvement and benefits that are accrued annually.

Fab Owners
Building a wafer fab and ramping that fab to production is an expensive investment. Consider this comparison: the new Queen Mary II is over 300 meters long, and carries 2,700 passengers as well as a crew of over a 1,000. It is the largest, finest, ocean liner in existence today. Four Queen Marry II’s could be built for the price of one of today’s state of the art 300 mm wafer fabs. Even faced with economics of this scale, fab owners generally handle construction management and equipment start-up themselves. 

Problem
A UC Berkeley study determined that an early week of production is equivalent to a percentage point improvement in yield over the life of a wafer fab. Unfortunately, significant reductions in time from ground breaking to production wafers out have not been achieved over the last decade. 

Current Industry Approach
Semiconductor wafer fab projects are typically managed by two separate organizations--one for facility construction, and a second for equipment procurement, installation and ramp to production. Routine project review meetings are held to ensure all construction contractors are on schedule, and similar reviews are conducted for tool start-up. So communication of critical information between contractors, construction managers, fab owner facilities management, fab owner module management, and equipment suppliers is passed up, across, and down these two silos. This is the case even in the most sophisticated fab owner organizations utilizing today’s most sophisticated project software applications. Advancements in cross-organization project management and standardization of project methodology are restricted by organizational momentum and corporate culture. Productivity improvements tend to be made within organizations, while significant opportunities for productivity gains between organizations and suppliers/contractors remain untapped.

Confoe RapidRamp Solution
Through RapidRamp, all contractors and suppliers are managed within Confoe’s virtual “one plan environment”. Complex interactions are comprehended and communicated in real time reports and daily work records. Real cost and cycle time reductions are realized because work plans are updated daily by the ones who are doing the work, and new work plans are “pushed” to all contractors and suppliers based on the previous day’s results. When required, the fab owner can coordinate work on utilities and process tools in parallel, without unnecessarily expediting work that does not affect wafer starts.  With Confoe’s methodology, all activities are synchronized and aligned based upon the critical path to wafers out.