Fast Track

44
March 2006 APICS magazine
A
nalog, digital, and mixed-
signal circuits made by
Micrel Semiconductor are
the secret to the success of many of
today’s high-speed networks, wire-
less phones, and many other popular
consumer electronics products. Based
in the heart of California’s Silicon
Valley, Micrel manufacturers its prod-
ucts based on hard orders and order
forecasts. “In good economic times,”
explains Roland Carlson, Micrel
information technology director and
chief information officer, “customers
were ordering products three-to-
five months ahead, which allowed
us to build to order because we
could see what the demand was and
schedule production accordingly.”
However, these days, the semicon-
ductor trade is, as Carlson puts it, a
“turns business,” and companies such
as Micrel are getting orders today to
ship tomorrow. As a result, the com-
pany has had to build to forecast with
the help of an effective work in process
(WIP) tracking system. This solution
was particularly important to Micrel’s
success because of the company’s
highly involved production process—
which takes about eight weeks.
“A good portion of [the production
process] is comprised of wafer fabri-
cation, in which we build the wafers
and then put them in storage, almost
like a wafer bank,” Carlson explains.
“We’ll hold the wafers there until we
need to finish them to fulfill customer
requests. Then they can be packaged
and tested, which can be done in
about two weeks.”
Micrel leaders chose to implement
Wonderware’s InTrack WIP solution,
which is built upon its manufacturing
execution systems (MES) software. In
conjunction with Micrel’s enterprise
resources planning (ERP) system, the
tool delivers benefits in the areas of
plant productivity, product quality,
customer deli very timing, and inven-
tory controls. Micrel installed InTrack
Fast
Integrated circuit manufacturer sees rapid results
with a comprehensive WIP solution
A Micrel employee performs the oxide etching process.
Track
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