Identifying a design management package to support concurrent design in building wafer fabrication facilities

Concurrent design is commonly used in building a semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities to shorten projects. Current practice in managing a design schedule involves preset milestones that represent percentages of completion. Such a simple control scheme does not provide sufficient information to support concurrent design. This study presents an analytical model that applies a cluster identification algorithm to separate the work of designing a multisystem project into management packages that support concurrent design. Tasks within a package have strong informational dependency relationships on each other, and are not suited for concurrent design. Tasks of different packages have weak dependency relationships on each other, and are suited for concurrent design. Tendering design work based on these packages may reduce the number of design interfaces between participating design firms. Possible application of the model includes the management of design schedule, design contract tendering, and design information flow.