MICRO:May 98:Industry News:Lead

Here's an axiom for chipmakers: If you want to run a good fab, find good managers to run it. After surveying more than 30 fab sites in the course of a six-year benchmarking study, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have concluded that since most fabs around the world use similar tools and processes, human performance factors separate the productive chip factories from their less efficient counterparts. "The differences aren't technologi-cal, they're managerial," asserts David Hodges, one of two codirectors for the ongoing Competitive Semiconductor Manufacturing (CSM) program. Established in 1991, the program involves faculty and students from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering, Haas School of Business, and the department of economics. The goal of the comparative study is to systematically explain the manufacturing practices used by the world's best fabs. Hodges, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, says faculty colleagues and graduate students who are participating in the CSM program "benchmark major parameters," including both wafer, or line, yield and die yield, then "normalize that for die area." They also measure "productivity in terms of wafer production and normalize that by the equipment set. For example, if you have 20 steppers we'll [determine] your productivity