An efficient data exchange scheme for semiconductor engineering chain management system

When IC production enters into the nano-meter generation, many yield problems are related to design. The semiconductor industry is eager to have engineering chain management systems (ECMSs) to tightly share engineering data among cooperative semiconductor companies, such as IC Design House, Mask-Fabrication Company, Foundry-Service Company, and Assembly/Test Company, via Internet for increasing the yield, reducing production cost, and decreasing time to market for a new IC. Traditionally, cooperative semiconductor companies exchange data through FTP that is activated manually. In recent years, the Web Services technology has provided a new and excellent approach for automatically exchanging and integrating data among heterogeneous systems on the Internet. In this paper, an ECMS framework for semiconductor industry is presented. Also, an efficient Web-Services-based data exchange scheme is developed to solve three core problems of data exchange in ECMS: the convenience of data exchange and integration, the security protection of data transmission, and the efficiency of transmitting data, in particular large binary data. Experimental test results show that the proposed EC data exchange scheme can fulfill the desired functional requirements and demonstrate a superior performance over the traditional data transfer methods. It is believed that the proposed data exchange scheme can be an effective solution to the data exchange problem of ECMS.