The multi-source fabless-foundry partnership selection model

Foundry selection is an important decision to a semiconductor fabless (FABricationLESS) design firm. This partnership is a long-term commitment and the success of a fabless is directly affected by the decision. This paper presents a multiple criteria evaluation model for international multiple foundry partnership selection. In a multiple source foundry environment, the fabless maintains partnership with several different foundries to diversify the risk of capacity shortage and natural disaster. We outline the potential planning problems for foundry partnership selection and analyse issues related to cost, yield and time to market. A hierarchical multiple criteria decision-making method for selecting the foundry partners is proposed. Based on a hierarchical structure, non-additive and additive fuzzy measurement is used to show the relative importance of criteria. To select a group of foundry partners, management culture, technology level and future growth are heavily interrelated, the fuzzy integral is, therefore, used to evaluate the synthetic performance of the best partners. To show the practicability and usefulness of this method, a Taiwan consumer integrated circuit (IC) fabless case was presented for evaluation. Results in this study not only confirm the practical nature of the proposed model, but also demonstrate the high flexibility in evaluation of a multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problem.