Our customer is a Santa Clara, US-based semiconductor capital equipment manufacturer serving chip makers including Intel, Motorola, Philips, IBM, TSMC, UMC, Chartered and Micron. On average, the machinery is worth millions and mistakes could prove costly. The customer expects uptimes of >95%m and consistent throughputs of wafers an hour.
The customer’s advanced etch equipment incorporates robot based motion control for wafer transport, RF plasma control, precision gas flow, temperature and pressure controls, real time GUI and Factory Interfaces. Most controls are closed-loop servo type controls. The equipment interfaces with diverse sensors and auxiliary equipment from third party manufacturers.
The software based on C, C++ and Java comprises 3 million lines of code. It is architected as a distributed multithreaded, multi tasking control system. The customer releases new software versions to end users every quarter. All releases include three categories of customer requests: equipment safety, equipment productivity and equipment usability requests.
The customer’s Santa Clara based team of 24 engineers owns these products, their 29 components and baselines. On average, team members have an SEMI industry experience of 8-9 years. Apart from cost arbitrage, transitioning etch software development and testing to India freed up the customer’s engineering bandwidth to focus on next generation etch equipment architecture, development and testing.
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The customer chose Mindteck for this project after satisfying several criteria. Over the past 7 years, Mindteck has built up vast expertise in executing SEMI based software development and testing projects over the past 7 years. Mindteck started the engagement initially as a resource extension model for the customer’s Santa Clara development team from December 2004 to March 2005. The following issues were identified and effectively addressed:
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Inadequate documentation adversely impacting the time-to-production of new recruits
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Roadblocks to knowledge-transfer from the Santa Clara team to the India team
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Unavailability of tool hardware for testing and development
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Low productivity and high defect rates
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Low customer responsiveness-levels
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Our team prioritized on gaining expertise on components that undergo maximum changes/enhancements. A task force within the team identified and documented reusable subcomponents. The development process was reengineered and made test-driven. Software component reuse was enforced to the maximum extent. Another task force was responsible for automating testing. The task force would manually test once before running the automated testing. A cross-functional team owned all 29 components. Under a rotational plan, two team members were available in Santa Clara at any point to support testing and development ensuring quick turnarounds.
The simulation capability was enhanced by porting the Vxworks-based simulators to PCs. The customer was provided with a monthly roadmap outlining how the team would meet predefined operational metrics. From the first quarter of 2007, our team has been responsible for the entire baseline.
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