Semiconductor Industry

Semiconductor companies fall under one of the following operating models

Fab-less Operating Model:

In this model, companies are primarily design houses that actually get their components manufactured completely through outsourced foundries, assembly and test vendors and in most case drop-ship their components directly from their outsourced manufacturers directly to the OEM customers or distributors.  Some of the semiconductor companies with this operating model are Atheros, Nvidia etc.

Integrated Device Manufacturing Operating Model:

Companies with this operating model are completely on top of manufacturing. They own the fabs and perform the assembly and test in house and ship their components to OEM through their own distribution network. Companies that fall under this operating model are Intel, AMD etc.

Fab-lite Operating Model:

This operating model is the combination of the above mentioned operating models. Companies that fall under this operating model usually have either some of their manufacturing operations outsourced – typically the test operations. Intersil and Sandisk fall under this operating model.

Gaea in Semiconductor Industry

Depending on whether they are fab-less or fab-lite or IDM (integrated device manufacturers), the semiconductor companies, have some unique aspects to their demand planning, supply chain planning and manufacturing execution processes. These translate into a unique set of requirements for their supply chain planning and execution systems.

These requirements then must be incorporated into a holistic supply chain solution for a semiconductor company, depending upon their operating model. Gaea understands these requirements very well through its experience in implementing supply chain solution for multiple semiconductor companies.

Some Unique requirements for a semiconductor supply chain planning and execution system include:

Demand Planning

• Incorporating design ins and probability based forecasting process.
• Reconciliation the forecasts between 3rd party sales representatives, design houses and OEMs.
• Ability to forecast demand for new devices, which are announced quite frequently.
• Modeling forecasts and replenishment planning in a semiconductor distributor environment.

Supply Chain Planning

• Model semiconductor supply chain for a fab-less model, Integrated Device Manufacturer (IDM) model and mixed business models?
• Support for various supply models including Build to Forecast, Build to Order, Build to Forecast to Die Bank (or any other postponement stage) and assemble/test to order.
• Deriving the wafer starts forecast while considering the capacities of Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test (OSAT) partner.
• Impact of down binning on demand and supply plan.
• Supporting a “die-bank’ strategy.

Manufacturing Execution

• Lot Tracking requirements
• Lot Genealogy management
• Support for Lot Splits/Merges

Gaea understand these requirements very well and can quickly model them into your supply chain system implementation. Result: a successful implementation done quickly and correctly the first time.

For additional information on how we can help you with either an assessment of your current Supply Chain systems environment or implementation/extension of your supply chain system

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