Overall Wafer Effectiveness (OWE): A novel industry standard for semiconductor ecosystem as a whole

As semiconductor industry reached nanotechnology generation and consumer electronics era, the competition is no longer among individual semiconductor companies. Indeed, the collaborations among horizontally specialized value providers are critical for the success of the companies as well as the whole ecosystem. This paper aims to propose a novel index, i.e., Overall Wafer Effectiveness (OWE), to measure wafer productivity and drive various improvement directions for semiconductor ecosystem as a whole. Furthermore, the proposed OWE can be easily extended to incorporate additional attributes such as mask-field-utilization, throughput, and yield for effective management. We conducted a number of case studies in real settings. The results have shown that OWE can be employed as a semiconductor industry standard to drive collaborative efforts among IC designers, equipment vendors, and manufacturers in the ecosystem to enhance total wafer effectiveness. This paper concludes with discussions on value propositions of proposed OWE indices and future research directions.

► We proposed Overall Wafer Effectiveness (OWE) to measure wafer productivity.
► OWE can drive improvement directions for semiconductor ecosystem as a whole.
► Empirical studies have validated the value propositions of OWE indices.
► An USA invention patent based on OWE has been granted and implemented.
► OWE is part of our efforts to construct a methodology for the industry as a whole.