BPT CASE STUDY
Author
Paul Harmon
Executive Editor
BP Trends
Filed:
November 2002
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The Texas Instruments MMST BPR Project
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To provide a good idea of what can be accomplished by a major reengineering
effort, consider the MMPS project undertaken by Texas Instruments between
1988 and 1993. Hammer and Champy cited TI’s work in Reengineering the
Corporation, as an example of a company that had made major
improvements in the manufacturing processes in their semiconductor division,
and this project provides a great example of the scope of such a major effort.
The author studied it for serveral different articles he wrote in the mid-Nineties
and was a judge on an Object Management Group panel that voted to give it
the first prize in a contest that selected the best major object-oriented
implementation in 1995.
The Problem
Texas Instruments is a major chip manufacturer. During the past decade, two
trends have dominated semiconductor chip manufacturing. First, each new
generation of chip required a more expensive facility for its manufacture. A
typical manufacturing facility cost around $1 billion in 1990. To offset this,
manufacturers were interested in doing larger batch runs to justify the setup
costs. At the same time, companies buying chips were increasingly
interested in moving away from batch production to small runs of tailored
chips. Small runs minimize the problems involved in manufacturing very
complex chips. The business model that dominated the industry in 1988
relied on economics of scale that were attained by large volumes with
minimum product variation. The bulk of the chips manufactured were dynamic
RAMS (DRAMs) that were appropriate for batch runs, but the real profits were
increasingly in customer-specific, or application-specific chips that are made
in relatively low-volume in a flexible manufacturing facility.
Batch production is expensive when one is manufacturing large chips because
a single error can turn an entire batch of expensive chips into junk. Ideally,
you would like to manufacture them one at a time, checking each chip
constantly to be sure each step worked correctly before moving on to the next
step.
The Reengineering Effort
In October 1988, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
and the US Air Force Wright Laboratory contracted with TI to develop a nextgeneration flexible semiconductor wafter fabrication system. The project is
generally known by its contract name, the Microelectronics Manufacturing
Science and Technology (MMST) project.
In essence, the goal of MMST was to redesign the chip manufacturing
process, creating new hardware and software, as necessary, to make it
possible to engage in cost-effective, low-volume manufacturing.
TI had been experimenting with a wide variety of new technologies for several
years. The challenge for the MMST team was to decide which of the various
new technologies could be made commercial in the time allowed for the
project. Conventional chip manufacturing relied on clean rooms, and the
© 2002 Business Process Trends
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BPT CASE STUDY
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The Texas Instruments MMST BPR Project
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manufacture of more complex chips required ever cleaner rooms. In addition,
batch processing means that an error at any phase could result in hundreds
or thousands of expensive but useless chips.
TI elected to create new machines that processed chips within a vacuum. To
further reduce the chances of contamination, the chips were manufactured
upside down. (Think of this as a piece of brainstorming. Dust is drawn to the
found by gravity. Chips were traditionally manufactured face-up, exposed to
any dust that might alight on them. By simply turning the equipment upside
down, dust was much less likely to settle on the surface of a chip.) Since
more than one machine was involved in processing a chip, a vacuum cassette
was developed. Chips were processed by one machine, inside the vacuum
environment maintained by that machine, then placed in the vacuum cassette,
which was then moved automatically to the next machine for further
processing. It sounds simple enough, but it actually required a very
sophisticated effort to simply design and manufacture the hardware that would
process the chips.
Another problem with chip manufacturing happens when an error occurred
during processing. Unless the error was detected immediately, a very
expensive effort was continued that only resulted in a defective chip. TI
elected to create hardware that would process one wafer at a time. It also
arranged to monitor the production process with a number of probes that were,
in effect, constantly checking to see if the evolving chip was within set
tolerances and functioning correctly. This monitoring process could only be
cost-effective if it could be completely automated. Thus, TI elected to create a
fully automated, real-time control system. The software system was designed
to plan and schedule the production of chips and then monitor each chip,
determine if any errors had occurred, and take appropriate action.
Obviously, replacing a manual, batch operation with an automated system
was going to require changes in the human support operations. Although jobs
changed, the automated system still required people to setup and monitor the
new system. One of the goals of the MMST effort was to provide terminals
that would provide employees with all the information they needed. In addition
IT elected to create a system that would let the monitors modify their terminal
displays to suit their preferences.
TI designed and manufactured machines that could process wafers in a
vacuum. In a similar way they designed and manufactured cassettes to move
chips between machines. The process required experimentation, handassembled prototypes, testing and finally the actual manufacture of a new
chip fabrication factory. TI also created a large, real-time software system to
run the new factory. TI elected to use new software techniques (objectoriented software design and development in Smalltalk). The overall design of
the MMST CIM software was divided into several phases, including an
architectural analysis phase, a prototyping phase, a design phase, and an
implementation phase.
© 2002 Business Process Trends
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BPT CASE STUDY
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The Texas Instruments MMST BPR Project
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Even in a fully automated wafer fabrication facility, a number of people are
needed to monitor the process, including production managers, engineers
responsible for the actual process sequence, hardware maintenance
engineers, etc. Thus, in addition to providing the software to run the machines
involved in the processing, the CIM system supports a number of workstations
each connected to a network that links the workstations to the manufacturing
machines. Different modules (e.g. factory planning, factory simulation
modeling, factory performance monitoring) provide interfaces and facilities for
the different people who must interact with the system. The heart of the
system is a scheduling or workflow system that processes orders by
selecting machines and directing material movement for each step to be taken
as a wafer is processed.
The Solution
TI completed the redesign in 1993 and installed the MMST system in its new
plants. In the process it developed the ability to manufacture application
chips in low volume in a cost-effective manner. TI developed a new line of
semiconductor manufacturing devices, ranging from large machines that
process wafers to vacuum cassettes that are used to transport wafers from
one machine to another and all of that hardware is now sold to other
semiconductor manufacturers.
In addition, TI had developed a modularized software system that controls the
manufacture of chips. The software was developed using new techniques that
make it especially easy to modify and extend so that it can be used by others
in related semiconductor Sematech, a consortium of semiconductor
manufacturers standardized on the new framework and it is now used by other
companies in the consortium.
TI’s MMST project represents a complete redesign of a process. The
developers began with a blank sheet of paper and asked themselves how they
could design custom chips, using new technology. They arrived at a
completely unique solution and created the hardware and software to support
their new concepts. They reengineered the jobs of the people involved,
replaced many jobs with software systems, and developed software systems
for the new jobs that were created.
The MMST project completely changed the economics of small scale chip
manufacturing, making it possible for TI to dominate a new field for years, and
to sell its expertise to those who wanted to compete with it. Thus MMST
represents an ideal example of reengineering – the complete redesign of a
process and the heavy use of computer technology to revolutionize the way
the process is accomplished.
© 2002 Business Process Trends
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