December 2023Semiconductors PracticeNeed to boost semiconductor fab efficiency? Look to maintenanceEquipment recovery, planned maintenance, and parts management can increase semiconductor fabs’ equipment availability and efficiencies.by Ryan Fletcher, Yorgos Friligos, Joydeep Guha, and Abhijit MahindrooThe global semiconductor industry is expanding at an unprecedented rate. Our analysis suggests that the industry will grow by 6 to 8 percent per year through 2030, when it will hit the $1 trillion annual revenue mark.Demand from end markets—for uses such as computing, data storage, wireless communication, and AI—is responsible for about 60 percent of this growth. The rest comes from industries that require mature nodes (wafers less than 200 millimeters [mm]), such as the automotive, industrial, and wired-communication segments. And while the dynamics in end markets that require leading-edge chips (such as in computing and AI) may create minor fluctuations in demand, the semiconductor industry will grow overall, at least for the next decade. The industry’s growth has been accompanied by investment. For the past 20 years, we’ve seen the leading-edge 300 mm wafer receive generous amounts of investment in the form of R&D and operational best practices, which has made it relatively easy to increase manufacturing capacity. But for wafer platforms that are 200 mm or smaller—which are frequently used for automotive, industrial, and wired communications—the story is different. Known as “mature nodes,” chips made on these platforms have historically responded to fixed demand and flat growth. But that changed when roaring end-market demand pushed mature node–manufacturing facilities—known as “fabs”—to their full capacity. Many fabs need a capacity boost—and quickly. Others need a performance boost to minimize the cost of tools being down for maintenance. But most fabs with mature nodes are at least 20 years old, with the equipment, processes, and productivity to match.In this context, fab efficiency takes on outsize importance for meeting market demand and cost expectations. The potential is significant. In our experience, improving equipment reliability can help a fab enhance its tool availability (the share of time that a piece of equipment is ready to process incoming work) by more than 15 percent. When applied to bottlenecks, about 70 to 80 percent of this improvement is transformed into the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) (an overall measure of a manufacturing operation’s utilization relative to its full potential) of the fab. As a result, the fab can quickly tap into significant latent capacity—often by more than 10 percent—without adding tools or expanding its footprint.Achieving this requires a significant change in mindsets, processes, and systems away from reactivity and toward prevention and advance planning. Fab leaders would need...
