Bottleneck breaker [six sigma programme for productivity improvement]

Intersil, designer and manufacturer of high-performance analogue semiconductor solutions, was faced with bottlenecks in the supply versus demand at its main fab. With the aid of Tefen, Intersil identified that the bottleneck was in the photo area and formed a team to develop a comprehensive roadmap for capacity and cycle time improvements. The team used the six sigma DMAIC methodology to systematically define, measure, analyze, improve and control the performance of the photo area. In the next six months after the initial assessment, photo cycle time dropped by 60%, while photo and overall fab production increased by 40% to record levels. The DMAIC methodology has proven to be an effective method for understanding problems and creating improvement to an operation.