Sensitivity Analysis of Multi-project Wafers Production Cost

Abstract

Multiple-project wafer (MPW) is now indispensable to mask cost reduction for low-volume integrated circuit production. Due to the high uncertainty of project design progress, a project may be abruptly withdrawn from or added to an MPW run. In this paper, we perform a cost sensitivity analysis of withdrawing a project from or adding a project to an MPW run. The analysis is especially useful for a foundry or a design service company to decide whether to accommodate one more project in an MPW run. The experimental results show that removing/adding a project with large chip area would increase/decrease the cost shared by each individual project for low-volume production. However, as production volume increases, no single rule can be drawn to characterize the change of the shared cost of each project. This further gives evidence to the need of having a systematic approach like the one proposed in this paper to evaluating such a change in an MPW run.