A Study on the Semiconductor Test Equipment Industry and Entry Strategies for New Entrants in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Chung-Yi Ting, 丁忠儀
• Other Authors: Chuang-Shing Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/39593608629002752460

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 商學研究所 === 94 === The semiconductor industry was originated in USA back in 1960’s. Later on the manufacturing moved to Japan then to Korea and Taiwan. Now there is an emerging China and many people are talking about promising India. During the migration process, USA, Japan, and even Korea have successfully developed associated equipment industries. In contrast, Taiwan has done very little in equipment development. That is, the semiconductor industry in Taiwan is still concentrated on OEM i.e. wafer foundries, assembly services, and test services. However, along with the move of semiconductor manufacturing from Taiwan to China, Taiwan’s position will sooner or later be replaced. Viewing USA and Japan, these countries have developed solid semiconductor equipment industry therefore when semiconductor manufacturing went off-shore, they still enjoy good return from selling equipments. Effectively, they pushed less valued manufacturing to other countries and keep high valued equipment business. From the story described above, we realized that equipment development is critical to a country’s long-term development in semiconductor industry. Similar things will be happening to the flat panel display (FDP) industry which, together with the semiconductor industry, is named “Twin Trillion” of Taiwan’s national development project. This research will discuss about automated test equipments (ATE) industry with a focus on non-memory test. We will firstly specify the motivation and the purpose of this research, also methodologies we will apply for this research. We then will review the academic theories and models we are going to employ to guide this research. The nature and the characteristics of the semiconductor test equipment industry will be introduced then an analysis will be conducted. At the end, we will make strategy suggestions for semiconductor test equipment new entrants in Taiwan. The scope of the research will not be limited to Taiwan and China markets. In fact, we want extend our scope to the global market. The competitive disadvantages of Taiwan in this industry include lag behind technology, no leading-edge customer, short of engineer resource, and the barrier to build a global sales and service infrastructure. However, Taiwan has a very solid semiconductor manufacturing infrastructure and is the second biggest fabless base in the world. These should be able to support the industry development by capitalizing its strength and avoiding its weakness. This research suggests that Taiwan ATE makers should capitalize the discontinuity of open architecture and initially position themselves as a module supplier. By doing so, they start to engage leading edge customers then they will have a better position to become a system solution provider in the long term. Key Words: Semiconductor Test, Automated Test Equipment, Open Architecture, Value Net.