A flexible and low-cost menagement technology is desired for fabrication line of both ASICs and cutting edge LSIs. To meet such desire, a management technology named "super operator shifts" has been proposed. After taking operator's skill level into consideration, an ASIC line manager can stretch line working time by use of the super operator shifts. It results that he can successfully get 3-shifts turn around time for severe-delivery-date lots with a payment equal to about 2-shifts line-cost.

A novel delivery management system using a new lot sampling scheduling (LSS) method has been developed. The method involves the concepts of "virtual line" and "marker lot," and the system consists of an on-line scheduler executing short-period scheduling for lot-tracking and an off-line scheduler executing long-period scheduling for delivery date simulation. The LSS method can hugely increase the maximum number of lots to simulate the delivery date and also control TAT more effectively compared to conventional dynamic scheduling. Lot progress is controlled by varying the resource allocation ratio for each virtual line. This method is effective for precise delivery date control of lots with various priorities in ASIC production or development lines.

Properties of a semi-insulating film deposited by Ar-Beam Sputtering have been investigated. This film was characterized with a substrate temperature lower than 150 during deposition. It was found that this film was as efficient in achieving breakdown characteristics higher than 400 V as were the conventional films.

A scalable and flexible ASIC CIM system distributed on UNIX workstations, ORCHARD , has been developed. It is designed from three viewpoints: (1) cost and TAT reduction in system construction, (2) flexibility in data management for quality control, and (3) precise and quick scheduling and effective lot tracking to control TAT for each lot. The concept of a "virtual machine" is introduced to connect equipment having various protocols to a host system. The virtual machine is automatically generated at an average automatic generation ratio of as high as 89%, which leads to a reduction in cost and TAT in system construction. Data for quality control is managed by changing flexibly the "data processing recipe." This recipe defines screen format, data collected from equipment, and data transfered from various databases. Precise scheduling of lots with various levels of priority is achieved by introducing a priority evaluation function, thereby reducing scheduling time to 1/20 that for manual scheduling.

We propose a method for configuring LSI manufacturing lines so that they can not only be used to manufacture low-cost LSIs in bulk quantities but also can be used to manufacture small lots with ultra-short TAT. This is achieved by adding a relatively small amount of single-wafer processing equipment to a existing conventional processing line, and therefore involves minimum investment.