Infrastructure for Integrated Electronics Design and Manufacturing (IIEDM)

Principal Investigator: Kevin Brady
(301) 975-3644
kevin.brady@nist.gov

Objective:
To actively contribute to the technical development of neutral product data and e-manufacturing exchange specifications and advanced interoperable e-business infrastructure components. In pursuit of this primary goal, the IIEDM project aids the growth of the electronics and semiconductor industries by providing two valuable services: technical expertise in an impartial forum in the development of standards and by providing assistance in resolving interoperability issues between similar, and often conflicting, standardization efforts.

Background:
The US Electronics and Semiconductor industries are still major pieces of the US economy with the semiconductor industry alone estimated as a $286 billon dollar market in 2008. Due to constantly changing array of projects and components on the market, increased international competition, new environmental restrictions, and the steadily decreasing time window to introduce new projects, both industries are looking to improve any aspect of their manufacturing, supply, and design chains. Several areas that are clearly driving industry are the need to develop improved data exchange standards, the need for providing support for new environmental regulations, the need to developing support for design for manufacturing (DFM), and the desire for enhanced factory automation.

Both the semiconductor and the electronics industry both are highly dependant on the electronic exchange of data. This can be anything from the exchange of printed circuit board designs between partner companies in a supply chain to the semiconductor industry where system on a chip (SOC) designs are bought, sold, and traded between companies. Due to highly competitive and dynamic nature of both industries, new standards are constantly being developed by companies seeking a competitive advantage or to reduce inefficiencies. However, creating new data exchange standards is far from easy and even a slight problem with a new standard can create more problems that it was meant to solve. There is a growing awareness in the electronics industry that it needs better software tools, better modeling tools, and expert guidance in order to generate the next generation of data exchange standards.

In 2006, the European Union’s Restriction of Hazardous Material Substances (RoHS) directive became one of the first of many environmental protection laws to be passed that will have a direct impact on the electronic industries manufacturing process. Other government bodies across the globe have been developing similar legislation all designed to protect human health and the environment. Unfortunately, as the electronics industry began to prepare for the effects of EU’s RoHS it became evident that there were no supply chain standards in place to support the necessary data exchange. While NIST and IPC provided industry with the IPC 1752 Material Declaration standard to ensure compliance with RoHS, the US electronics industry is now facing a tidal wave of new regulations coming from all corners. This has the electronics industry scrambling to both understand all these new regulations and at the same time develop the needed supply chain infrastructure in order to ensure compliance before the laws go into effect.One of the main drivers for the manufacturing process is that in order to meet product quality and cost objectives companies can no longer think in terms of isolated design and manufacturing operations. To successfully create nanometer-scale designs requires a tighter link between the manufacturing process and the actual design phase of the project. In order to contend with the physical effects that become more troublesome at smaller geometrics requires manufacturing specific information to be available during the design process. Having this DFM information can result in reduced problems, reduced product re-spins, increased product yield. However, industry is struggling to get this information from the foundry and back up to the product designer. This is largely due to the lack of standards and concerns about potential intellectual property loss. As for factories, one driving issue is the increasing complexity of next-generation semiconductor manufacturing and decreasing process tolerances which require accurate equipment and factory time synchronization and data time stamping in order to fully exploit automation capabilities and new data availability. Accurately time-stamped data enables rapid, automated multi-variate analysis in Advanced Process Control and Fault Detection Classification applications. Intelligent analyses capabilities can expedite product ramp-up time and result in enhanced quality and yield of the final product. Acquiring reliable timestamps entail accurate time synchronization of all factory equipment, subsystems, and other distributed components. Establishing distribute synchronization requires all factory clocks to be able to communicate to a specific timing protocol. In addition to enhanced time synchronization, industry must develop standards that can establish the quality of the data being returned from the factory equipment. These are all prerequisite steps for industry in order to create the next generation fully automated factory.