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ISMI Symposium drilldown: Spooning out the alphabet soup, meandering through the mantras |
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Oct 26, 2007 at 12:26 PM |
Every semiconductor manufacturing or technology conference provides a rich source of new, unfamiliar, or at least previously unheard acronyms, initialisms, terms, and industry mantras, and this week's ISMI Symposium on Manufacturing Effectiveness was no exception.
Here's a random sampling from the Austin event:
- There's a continuing inconsistency among the green side of the chipmaking community about the proper sequence of their core initialism: Is it EHS or ESH (environment[al], health, safety or ... safety and health)? Perhaps it's time to abate this confusion and clean-build a little consensus.
- The defining term and accompaying TLA (that's three-letter acronym, as if you didn't know) emanating from the conference was next-generation factory (NGF), regardless of whether such a fab employs 300- or 450-mm wafers. Add it the list of other industry "next-gen" TLAs, such as next-generation lithography (NGL) and Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG).
- In a similar vein, the distinct chanting of a productivity-related mantra (and yet another TLA) could be heard in several presentations: Reduce first-wafer delay (FWD)! Or in the case of ISMI's NGF vision (it's the consortium's top priority guideline for 300-mm productivity enhancement), eliminate FWD! I guess when the industry solves that pesky FWD problem, they can move FWD.
- ISMI calls its strategy of parallel development on 300-mm Prime and 450-mm a "complementary forward-compatible approach." Shouldn't they just make that "CFCA"? What's the harm in one more initialism for the Sematech glossary? If you have something moving forward in synergy, shouldn't there be an antonymic counterterm, in this case, "uncomplementary backward-incompatible boondoggle," or "UBIB"? With either term, a precise definition remains as elusive as 100% yields.
- Anyone who's stepped foot inside a chip fab or knows a bit about the semi manufacturing business should be quite familiar with the term "wafers per hour," or WPH. In one TI presentation, a variation on that term came up: wafers per available hour, which is a measure of the number of actual product wafers divided by the number of hours the equipment was actually available for processing (a more useful metric, it would seem, from plain ol' WPH). But while WPH is a well-known TLA, why hasn't WPAH hasn't embedded itself on the acronym list?
- Another term-and-TLA combo popped up during an IBM presentation on a fab optimization model: daily going rate, or DGR, which is used to measure how fab capacity is being utilized (not what the going rate for a fully equipped 300-mm fab might be on a given day). I like this one, because you can pronounce it. One can imagine the conversation at Big Blue: "Damn it, we gotta improve our digger!" or "Our digger is better than your digger (nah-nah-na-na-nah)."
- One speaker had a great slip o' the tongue and inadvertently (or was it advertent?) created a new word: "sympodium," which is, I'll assume, either the podium you stand at when presenting at a symposium or the bully pulpit that speaking at a symposium provides.
- Finally, here's a new industry-centric, cycle-time-(un)friendly tongue-twister that defies continuously correct pronunciation (and apparently still plagues certain fabs): "lost lots, lost lots, lost lots, lost lots, lost lots..." Go ahead, try and say it while you hunt down that missing WIP.
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