| Summary: | 博士 === 國立交通大學 === 管理科學系所 === 96 === Integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing has been playing a decisive role in Taiwan semiconductor industry. To compete for purchase orders from top market players and to address the drastically competitive environment, semiconductor manufacturers are striving to seek technical breakthroughs for acquiring advanced, stable process and building significant technical barriers. For Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturers, however, new process development is relatively difficult. Principally, the three “know-hows”, instrument (or metrology), raw material and process equipment, depend on the support from suppliers abroad. Subject to such an adverse environment, it takes both time and resources for Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturers to achieve any process innovation, even negligible, not to mention insurmountable technical barriers set by competitors.
For this reason, these manufacturers are recommended to break out of existing thinking patterns, instead of being stuck to obsolete R&D routines. With additional R&D activities, we may lower the threshold and eliminate the bottleneck to develop a brand new R&D approach different from previous ones. To build the technical threshold for competitors, these manufacturers, apart from engaging in semiconductor process development, should launch the revision and development of process equipment and achieve the ultimate benefit by solving problems with process interface. In terms of final output of the entire IC process development, there will only be process-related output but also specific methodology or hardware/software, which is extremely process-, equipment-, instrument-, or process-dependent R&D results. The additionally attached R&D activities that we address in this paper are called “supportive R&D activities”. Namely, to successfully implement “major R&D activities”, we are trying to seek additional R&D activities for settling problems arising thereof. Meanwhile, while sharing limited resources, we should be committed to protecting R&D results from infringement or creating more added values, which would be the ultimate goal of supportive R&D activities. This study is intended to provide a discussion on implementation and processes of supportive R&D activities, followed by descriptions of new products from the R&D activity and ways to accelerate or improve the semiconductor process.
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