VLSI Revisited - Revival in Japan

This paper describes the abundance of semiconductor consortia that have come into existence in Japan since the mid-1990s. They clearly reflect the ambition of the government - through its reorganized ministry METI and company initiatives - to regain some of the industrial and technological leadership that Japan has lost. The consortia landscape is very different in Japan compared with EU and the US. Outside Japan the universities play a much bigger and very important role. In Europe there has emerged close collaboration, among national government agencies, companies and the EU Commission in supporting the IT sector with considerable attention to semiconductor technologies. Another major difference, and possibly the most important one, is the fact that US and EU consortia include and mix partners from different areas of the semiconductor landscape including wafer makers, material suppliers, equipment producers and integrated device makers.semiconductors, Hitachi, Sony, Toshiba, Elpida, Renesas, Sematech, VLSI, JESSI, MEDEA, ASPLA, MIRAI, innovation system

VLSI REVISITED – REVIVAL IN JAPAN

This paper describes the abundance of semiconductor consortia that have come into existence in Japan since the mid-1990s. They clearly reflect the ambition of the government – through its reorganized ministry METI and company initiatives - to regain some of the industrial and technological leadership that Japan has lost. The consortia landscape is very different in Japan compared with EU and the US. Outside Japan the universities play a much bigger and very important role. In Europe there has emerged close collaboration, among national government agencies, companies and the EU Commission in supporting the IT sector with considerable attention to semiconductor technologies. Another major difference, and possibly the most important one, is the fact that US and EU consortia include and mix partners from different areas of the semiconductor landscape including wafer makers, material suppliers, equipment producers and integrated device makers.semiconductors; Hitachi; Sony; Toshiba; Elpida; Renesas; Sematech; VLSI; JESSI; MEDEA; ASPLA; MIRAI; innovation system

Implementation of a Knowledge Management System

Premi al millor Projecte de Fi de Carrera presentat durant l'any 2012 en l'àmbit d'Organizació Industrial i Gestió que atorga ACCENTURE.The present master thesis carries out a study on the implementation of a ―Knowledge Management System‖ in the supply chain department of an internationally reputed electronics firm: Infineon Technologies AG, from now on referred to as ―Infineon‖. The first part of the study consists on carrying out a knowledge audit within Infineon‘s supply chain; this part concentrates on determining where the knowledge is and how it flows within Infineon‘s supply chain. After having analysed the current state of knowledge management and having examined the results of a survey that gathers information about all the problems that affect Infineon‘s supply chain we will identify all those problems that come from Infineon‘s current policy regarding knowledge management. After having found the main problems that affect Infineon‘s supply chain with regard to knowledge management we will come up with a general solution. As it will be seen, the solution will consist of four different measures that combined will give birth to a very solid knowledge management system, each one of the four measures aims at solving certain problems. The most important measure and the most innovative one, will try to refurbish the company‘s culture and increase its employees‘ awareness on knowledge creation and sharing. It will make use of the internal social network to make all employees concerned about the problems that the SC suffers and its potential solutions. The other three measures, more traditional ones, exist already in the company but have not attained the expected results; the goal of the new knowledge management system will be to make them succeed. They consist in the creation of a knowledge repository with all the company knowledge, the implementation of an internal ―Wikipedia‖ which will be called ―iWiki‖ and the creation of an academy to give trainings to the employees on supply chain related topics. The three measures, that will sometimes overlap, will complement each other in a way that every single employee finds his way to better access and share knowledge Due to time constraints and to the nature of this master thesis only the first measure of the proposed knowledge management system will be fully developed and we will even witness the first steps of its implementation. However, the other two measures will be explained and further guidance will be given so that the project can be continued in the future.Award-winnin

A product mix and a material flow problem concerning the semiconductor manufacturing industry

Das zentrale Thema dieser Arbeit behandelt die Optimierung der Programm- und Ablaufplanung in der Halbleiterindustrie. Die Diplomarbeit besteht aus zwei separaten Teilen. Der erste Abschnitt befasst sich mit einem Unternehmen aus dieser Branche namens Infineon Technologies AG. Dieser internationale Konzern dient als Beispiel für den theoretischen Hintergrund des Halbleiter-Fertigungsprozesses mit seinen spezifischen Anforderungen. Das zugrunde liegende Verfahren zeichnet sich durch große Anfälligkeit der Produkte während des Produktionsprozesses und enorme Komplexität aus. Da die gesamte Fertigung nicht als Ganzes betrachtet und optimiert werden kann, werden in der Diplomarbeit zwei unterschiedliche Problemstellungen angeführt: ein Produkt-Mix und ein Material-Flow-Problem. Dabei wird einerseits versucht, den Profit zu maximieren, andererseits soll die gesamte Herstellungszeit innerhalb einer Werkstatt minimiert werden. Diese beiden Sachverhalte werden zunächst theoretisch diskutiert und in weiterer Folge wird die mathematische Modellierung mit Xpress optimal gelöst. Das Produkt-Mix Teilproblem erfordert lediglich die Umsetzung in Xpress, da die generierten Ergebnisse Optimalität aufweisen und die Rechenzeit sich um 0 Sekunden in jedem Durchlauf bewegt. Daher wird kein weiterer Vergleich mit einer anderen Software-Implementierung dargestellt. Die generierten Lösungen des Materialfluss-Problems aus Xpress werden mit den heuristischen Ergebnissen anhand der Implementierung in C++ verglichen. Diese Ergebnisse erreichen die Optimalität nicht, sondern bieten eine gute und praktikable Lösung für eine größere Auswahl von Fällen in angemessener Rechenzeit

Semantic data integration for supply chain management: with a specific focus on applications in the semiconductor industry

Supply Chain Management (SCM) is essential to monitor, control, and enhance the performance of SCs. Increasing globalization and diversity of Supply Chains (SC)s lead to complex SC structures, limited visibility among SC partners, and challenging collaboration caused by dispersed data silos. Digitalization is responsible for driving and transforming SCs of fundamental sectors such as the semiconductor industry. This is further accelerated due to the inevitable role that semiconductor products play in electronics, IoT, and security systems. Semiconductor SCM is unique as the SC operations exhibit special features, e.g., long production lead times and short product life. Hence, systematic SCM is required to establish information exchange, overcome inefficiency resulting from incompatibility, and adapt to industry-specific challenges. The Semantic Web is designed for linking data and establishing information exchange. Semantic models provide high-level descriptions of the domain that enable interoperability. Semantic data integration consolidates the heterogeneous data into meaningful and valuable information. The main goal of this thesis is to investigate Semantic Web Technologies (SWT) for SCM with a specific focus on applications in the semiconductor industry. As part of SCM, End-to-End SC modeling ensures visibility of SC partners and flows. Existing models are limited in the way they represent operational SC relationships beyond one-to-one structures. The scarcity of empirical data from multiple SC partners hinders the analysis of the impact of supply network partners on each other and the benchmarking of the overall SC performance. In our work, we investigate (i) how semantic models can be used to standardize and benchmark SCs. Moreover, in a volatile and unpredictable environment, SC experts require methodical and efficient approaches to integrate various data sources for informed decision-making regarding SC behavior. Thus, this work addresses (ii) how semantic data integration can help make SCs more efficient and resilient. Moreover, to secure a good position in a competitive market, semiconductor SCs strive to implement operational strategies to control demand variation, i.e., bullwhip, while maintaining sustainable relationships with customers. We examine (iii) how we can apply semantic technologies to specifically support semiconductor SCs. In this thesis, we provide semantic models that integrate, in a standardized way, SC processes, structure, and flows, ensuring both an elaborate understanding of the holistic SCs and including granular operational details. We demonstrate that these models enable the instantiation of a synthetic SC for benchmarking. We contribute with semantic data integration applications to enable interoperability and make SCs more efficient and resilient. Moreover, we leverage ontologies and KGs to implement customer-oriented bullwhip-taming strategies. We create semantic-based approaches intertwined with Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to address semiconductor industry specifics and ensure operational excellence. The results prove that relying on semantic technologies contributes to achieving rigorous and systematic SCM. We deem that better standardization, simulation, benchmarking, and analysis, as elaborated in the contributions, will help master more complex SC scenarios. SCs stakeholders can increasingly understand the domain and thus are better equipped with effective control strategies to restrain disruption accelerators, such as the bullwhip effect. In essence, the proposed Sematic Web Technology-based strategies unlock the potential to increase the efficiency, resilience, and operational excellence of supply networks and the semiconductor SC in particular

Global economic trends in the context of investor relations and strategic management. A longitudinal analysis of trends utilized in annual reports of German blue chip corporations.

Besides being confronted with fierce competition, today’s corporations face macroeconomic driving forces that change the configuration of existing and future markets that are also called “global economic trends” (GET) or “megatrends”. Currently, research does not provide a coherent view or theory for the assessment of these trends, which often leads to misinterpretation in business and academics. Literature such as publications provided by governmental institutions, multinational corporations, or consulting companies provide numerous examples where economic trends like globalization or the over-aging of western societies are depicted as global megatrends in the context of strategic management and economic research. The rather arbitrary use of the terms in literature leads to the idea that trend terms are vehicles to transport subjective assumptions about future developments that stem from foresight and innovation activities. Authors like Groddeck and Schwarz (2013) or Rust (2008) criticize the vague definition of these types of trends and question the information value and validity of “global economic trends” and “megatrends”. A growing body of literature points out that web search data is an ideal foundation for econometrical analysis and forecasting, because behavioral data of online user activity allow researchers to make inferences about the current state of economic decision-making of users, which is also called nowcasting (cf. e.g. Askitas and Zimmermann, 2009; Choi and Varian, 2012; Vosen and Schmidt, 2011; Dimche and Davcev, 2014). So far, there has been little to no work on trends that implements the tool Google Trends, which is the breading ground for the empirical research of this thesis. To get an insight view into the utilization of trends, a pilot study revealed that (1) corporation use of the terms “global economic trend” and "megatrend" in annual reports from 2008 to 2012, and (2) web search data from Google Trends correlates with the geographical location of multinational enterprises and economic wealthy regions measured in GDP. In the empirical part of the thesis, a long-term study from 2004 to 2014 explores how German stock market listed corporations (DAX) adopt trends in their business strategy, and how these trends are represented in web searches. Based upon a mixed-methods research approach, the thesis examines in detail what trends are utilized in annual reports and investigates these trends based on qualitative methods from the field of foresight. Then the results are analyzed with the use of web search data quantitatively. The qualitative analysis of annual reports revealed that: • In total, 5,920 passages that contained the term “trends” were identified in the population (n=330) of annual reports from 2004 to 2014. Included in the empirical research were 2,012 trend passages, whereof 392 trends were categorized as direct trend passages (TP), and whereof 1,620 were classified as indirect TPs. • The use of terms like “global economic trends” and “megatrends” grows from 2004 (117) to 2014 (273). However, only a few corporations used this term directly, but describe the effects indirectly with the use of other terminology. In 2005, Siemens AG firstly introduced the term “megatrends”. • The analysis revealed that directly mentioned TPs are more likely to be depicted as an opportunity, rather than a risk in annual reports with an odds ratio of 6.63. The 2,012 trend passages found in annual reports were categorized with an existing system that provides the attributes social, technological, economic, environment, political, and value (STEEPV). In addition, an individual categorization system (ICS) was developed as a tailor-fitted solution for the analysis of trends used in annual reports. The following outcomes were produced when both systems were applied to the data: • The STEEPV categorization system is capable of categorizing trend passages from an ex-post perspective. The final distribution of categories has a strong qualitative appeal and the application of a STEEPV category is ambiguous. The category “Economic” (74%) dominates in the overall population. • The implementation of the newly developed system reduced the overall use of the category “economic” was reduced to 45%. For quantitative analysis, (1) an indicator called Regional Index (RI) was created to analyze geographical information of web search data and (2) an indicator called confidence ranking index (CRI) was developed that measures the reported confidence of a corporation towards each trend mentioned in the annual report that is used for further examination. First, the regional index was used for correlation analysis between geographical information of web search data and GDP data, and for creating a visualization module developed with the statistical software R that provides geographical maps of web trend searches. It could be shown that: • Google Trends data is not provided globally. Scarce data from countries like China and Russia shows that the use of Google is restricted in these countries. • The regional index correlates well GDP with .591 (p < .001) on a global level, which indicates a linear relationship. A regression analysis reveals that the global RI index is able to explain 35% of the total variance. • The regional index has an even higher correlation for Germany with .841 (p < .001) on a local level. In the regression model, the local RI is able to explain 70% of the total variance. This undermines the results of the pilot study. Assuming that financial KPIs might have an influence on the CRI index, two regression models were developed that incorporate operational income and shareholders’ equity as explanatory variables. One model interprets the overall population as cross-sectional data and uses regression analysis, and the other model uses a generalized estimated equations (GEE) approach. The results indicate that: • The cross-sectional model has an R2 of .103 and adjusted R2 of .097. Approximately only 10 % of the total variation is explainable by the model, which is considered as interim results in the exploratory research. • The GEE model only contains operating income as an independent variable. With an R2 of 0.174 and an adjusted R2 of .143, the model showed little improvement in comparison to the cross-sectional model. The rather weak influence indicates that financial KPIs have a rather low influence to the CRI index, which motivated further steps of inquiry. At this phase, web search data from Google Trends was implemented and tested for its explanatory capacity. An automated correlation analysis based on the qualitative assessment of annual reports was developed to identify those Google Trend time series with the best model fit. It could be demonstrated that, • Nine hundred forty-one trend terms were found in the annual reports that were the foundation for extracting Google Trends data from 2004 to 2014 with the regional setting global and local for Germany. Globally 315 trends were returned, of which 87 trend series had a high significance (p < .01) to the CRI index. One hundred twenty- two (39%) series correlated significantly with CRI (p <0.05), and 106 (34%) showed no correlation. Thirty-six trends were returned on the local level, whereof six were highly significant (17%), 19 were significant (53%), and 11 (31%) had no significance. • Each dataset was used as a foundation for regression analysis with the confidence ranking index (CRI) as the dependent variable. The individual qualities of the ordinary least square (OLS) models measured by the coefficient of determination (R2) range from .36 to .85 on a global level and from .37 to .75 on a local level. • To optimize the previously developed OLS model with CRI as the dependent variable, the annual mean of the obtained global and local web search data was added. Google Trend data could optimize the regression measured in R2 to .151 for global data based on search terms like “Innovation trends” or “Corporate responsibility, and to .149 for local data based on search terms like “Social media” or “RFID”. • On the contrary to OLS, an optimization of the developed GEE model required the creation of an index per annual report that sums up the local and global Google web search results individually per for each trend used per annual report. A comparison of different working structures based on the Akaike's information criterion reveals that an one-period autoregressive correlation or AR(1) has the best model fit. The thesis contributes to the theoretical discussion about the information value of GETs and shows empirically that trend terms like “GETs” and ”megatrends” are rather artificial and have a strong subjective character. This was also confirmed by the longitudinal trend analysis that was based on the methodologies of mixed-method research, which combined and extended qualitative and quantitative methods. In addition, the thesis takes a unique approach optimizing the quality of multivariate models. By implementing web search data into linear regression and generalized estimation equation models, the overall performance of the models could be improved.Administración y Dirección de Empresa

A Prescriptive Maintenance Aligned Production Planning and Control Reference Process

Digital innovations can improve various business processes, such as production planning and control (PPC). In the last years, prescriptive maintenance (PxM) emerged as a strategy to increase overall production performance, but an alignment of the PPC process with PxM has not been examined yet. To tackle this problem, a PxM-aligned PPC process is designed and evaluated in this study using a reference model development methodology, including a narrative literature review, a multivocal literature review, and eight expert interviews. The reference model shows where process elements benefit from PxM alignment, how alignment can be achieved from a process and output, data, function, and organization view, and where fits and gaps between theory and practice are

RFID: Prospects for Europe: Item-level Tagging and Public Transportation

This report, which is part of the COMPLETE series of studies, investigates the current and future competitiveness of the European industry in RFID applications in general and in two specific cases: item-level tagging and public transportation. It analyses its constituent technologies, drivers and barriers to growth, actual and potential markets and economic impacts, the industrial position and innovative capabilities, and it concludes with policy implicationsJRC.DDG.J.4-Information Societ

Distributed Stochastic Market Clearing with High-Penetration Wind Power

Integrating renewable energy into the modern power grid requires risk-cognizant dispatch of resources to account for the stochastic availability of renewables. Toward this goal, day-ahead stochastic market clearing with high-penetration wind energy is pursued in this paper based on the DC optimal power flow (OPF). The objective is to minimize the social cost which consists of conventional generation costs, end-user disutility, as well as a risk measure of the system re-dispatching cost. Capitalizing on the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), the novel model is able to mitigate the potentially high risk of the recourse actions to compensate wind forecast errors. The resulting convex optimization task is tackled via a distribution-free sample average based approximation to bypass the prohibitively complex high-dimensional integration. Furthermore, to cope with possibly large-scale dispatchable loads, a fast distributed solver is developed with guaranteed convergence using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Numerical results tested on a modified benchmark system are reported to corroborate the merits of the novel framework and proposed approaches.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems; 12 pages and 9 figure