Accelerating productivity: key to industry prosperity

摘要

ISMI - it's all about productivity: increasing output and decreasing costs. It's where the rubber meets the road, where R&D meets manufacturing, as you'll see in this special issue of Solid State Technology. ISMI's program portfolio covers the spectrum from fundamental cost reduction activities in today's fabs and the development of near-term enabling infrastructure, to the long-term transition to next-generation fabs. Collectively, ISMI's collaborative programs contribute to the manufacturing success of our member companies, and provide valuable insight into the priorities of our industry and its leading chipmakers. Some keywords for ISMI activities are time, energy, data, performance, cycle time, information, and productivity. Time is important not only for our productivity improvement objectives at a high level, but also for optimal performance of our manufacturing fabs. In that context, the very data used to manage and control our fabs must be synchronized with accurate timekeeping across hundreds of production equipment types and thousands of wafers. In fact, millisecond resolution is required in some cases.