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Solutions

One of the companies from the semiconductor industry was implementing ERP solution to their business. Project team was testing the implementation with real-time business cases.

For front-end sites, photomask procurement process was not working as expected. War-room was set to check for any quick-fixes to resolve the issues or work-around possible to execute the process.

Can the system go-live functionally with acceptable bugs/ workarounds or without implementing business process? Project team decided to defer go-live date for front-end sites. So, what is photomask and why photomask process has so much importance?

What is photomask ?

Photomasks are used for optical lithography in silicon wafer processing and contain the pattern of the integrated circuits.

Optical lithography is a photographic process by which a light-sensitive polymer, called a photoresist, is exposed to light source, and developed to form 3D relief images on the substrate.

For understanding purpose, photomask is a kind of template which replicates chip circuit design. It is quartz or glass substrate coated with an opaque film.

Importance of Photomask in Semiconductor manufacturing

Photomask is one of the main front-end manufacturing materials, along with materials like silicon wafers, gases, wet chemicals, photoresist.

In one of the papers submitted by semiconductor industry association in April 2021[2], they have given the breakdown of market size of semiconductor manufacturing materials.

As per data of 2019, photomask market share contributes to 12% of front-end materials

Success factors for IT solution for photomask procurement

1. Focus on the business KPIs

Each business process has unique KPIs. In case of photomask procurement, time criticality and data security are key areas to be focused.

a. Time criticality – Reduction in procurement cycle time

•  Select correct solution components while implementing IT solutions.  Wrong selection of solution components may lead to higher administrative times in process execution and can also increase complexity of the process execution. 

Example – creating material master/ part master/ item master for each photomask is not a good idea considering uniqueness of photomask. 

•  Analyze the potential for process automation to reduce number of keyboard strokes and mouse clicks. It will not only reduce the cycle time but will also achieve quality documentation.  

b. Data security

Various countries have already established data protection regulations to secure the data. Photomask designs can be considered as IPs of the organization. Any misuse/ leakage of the data can lead to business risks and financial losses.

• Security teams should provide only relevant data access to individual roles within photomask procurement. Encryption/decryption techniques in the data flow provides additional security to data. 

• Optimize data footprint – ERP implementation teams should avoid duplicating the data of photomask drawings, technical attributes and commercial data. 

During IT solution implementation, there is an inclination to store all the data at one place to ease the reporting and hence replication of data is preferred in case of multitenant IT implementations. The inclination should be avoided.

2. Solution scalability and flexibility

Digital technology is growing with lightning speed. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, IoT are driving the world and are already part of day-to-day life.

Due to increasing applications, chip and photomask designs are changing and are getting more and more complex.

Considering the possibility of change in the number of attributes that describes the photomask, IT solution should be scalable and flexible enough to accommodate these changes in the photomask attributes.

3. Solution maintenance

Selection of ‘best fit’ system components helps to come out quickly from situations like system maintenance, system upgrades.

This is especially important for photomask underlining time criticality of the business process