Manufacturing cost analysis system in semiconductor enterprises

Semiconductor manufacturing may be one of the most complex types of manufac turing today. It can be functionally divided into two large manufacturing p rocesses such as front-end (wafer fabrication and probe) and back-end (asse mbly and test). The total number of steps in two manufacturing processes is approaching 100 to 500 steps or more steps for each device. The complexity and stochastic nature of its processes make the cost analysis difficult. T raditional costing techniques allocate costs to products based on attribute s of a single unit. Typical attributes include direct labour or the number of machine hours required to manufacture a unit. Hence, allocations vary di rectly with the volume of units produced. In contrast, ABC (Activity Based Costing) systems focus on activities required to produce each product or pr ovide each service based on the consumption of activities of each product o r service. In this paper, we will introduce an activity-based cost estimati ng system developed for semiconductor industry. Significance: This paper describes a newly developed manufacturing cost ana lysis system for semiconductor manufacturing enterprises, So far, there has been almost no research paper, which explains how the components in ABC sy stem interact with components in planning system. This paper explains the i ntegration architecture and work flows in order to provide a basic design c oncept for integrated costing system. This system is one of the modules of X-CITTIC planning system, which has been successfully implemented in two ma jor European semiconductor enterprises.