New Roadmap Flags Electronics Industry Roadblocks.

The electronics manufacturing industry in the United States faces some pretty stiff challenges, according to an ambitious roadmap just released by the industry organization NEMI (National Electronics Manufacturing Initiative). More than 400 individuals from 190 organizations contributed to the

The new roadmap's main value is seen as helping the industry to understand the direction the technology is heading, said Jim McElroy, executive director and CEO of NEMI, in Herndon, Virginia. At the same time the roadmap helps universities "set their agenda for R&D programs," he added.

This agenda will be shaped by the growth of such products as cellular telephones, along with the possibility that they will surpass personal computers as the main means for accessing the Internet, NEMI finds. Its roadmap identifies key challenges in such areas as packaging and assembly processes, supply chain management, design for environment, and the productivity of design and test software for silicon devices.

For example, the roadmap observes that "demand from wireless products could use [the] entire installed manufacturing capacity for discrete passive devices by the year 2004." That in itself may lead to increased integration of passive components in silicon.

The roadmap also confirms that North American manufacturers' high-volume production of the high-density printed-circuit boards that use an advanced technology known as microvia continues to lag behind that of manufacturers in the Far East. About 90 percent of these printed circuit boards are manufactured in the Far East, McElroy noted.

The combination of optoelectronics and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) pose additional packaging challenges. Because MEMS applications are diverse they will require "substantial changes" to components and assembly and test processes to accommodate the mixture of optical, mechanical and electrical signals, the roadmap notes.

Furthermore, NEMI cites the need for increased manufacturing capacity for both components and optical fiber to meet the growing optical telecommunications market. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of optical fiber using dense wavelength division multiplexing will be higher than 50 percent by 2005. Equally impressive, the CAGR of optical switching components will reach 67 percent by 2009.

Boosting Productivity

NEMI's roadmap advises electronics manufacturers looking for more opportunities to boost their productivity to focus on improving the responsiveness of their supply chains. As the trend to outsourcing manufacturing services has intensified, manufacturing has shifted from OEMs to providers of electronic manufacturing services.

The roadmap emphasizes the key role that information technology plays in company productivity, notably in such areas as supply chain management, enterprise resource planning, human resources management, and customer relationships. It calls for developing standards that will simplify the exchange of information among different elements of the supply chain.

Recognizing too that environmentally-responsive products will win in the global marketplace, the roadmap focuses on two action areas: elimination of troublesome materials such as lead from electronics manufacturing processes (soldering, for example), and design of products for end-of-life so that they may be cost-effectively broken apart for reuse (recycling) of their raw materials and/or components.

The roadmap raises a red flag on design tool productivity, warning that design tools and designers "are unable to keep pace with the rate of advancement in silicon technology." Design productivity has increased at the rate of 21 percent per year, compared to a 60-percent annual increase of functions per chip. However, NEMI offers no solution to the problem, leaving it to other organizations to resolve.

Other Roadmaps

NEMI's roadmap is far from an isolated effort--it has strong links with roadmaps and related inputs from other organizations, including the Semiconductor Industries Association, which initiated a technology roadmap as early as 1992. Subsequently updated in 1994, that roadmap guided such organizations as the Semiconductor Research Corp. and Sematech with their respective research and technology development efforts.

Other organizations that contributed to the NEMI roadmap include the Optoelectronics Industry Development Association, the National Storage Industry Consortium, the U.S. Display Consortium, the Supply Chain Council, and the International Microelectronics Packaging Society.

Beyond the electronics industry, there are numerous roadmaps of other industries, including chemicals, steel, glass, and aluminum, as well as roadmaps that cut across industries, according to Dudley W. Caswell, president of Enterprise Innovations, Herndon, Virginia, and consultant to industry and government.

Caswell, who had a principal role in developing roadmaps for such organizations as the Integrated Manufacturing Technology Initiative, a not-for-profit organization in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, noted that among the roadmaps that cut across industries are those that focus on concerns that are common to those industries, such as information systems, modeling and simulation, manufacturing processes and equipment, enterprise integration, and sensors and controls for both discrete and continuous processes.

He emphasized that to be useful beyond just an academic exercise, a roadmap must include action items that will propel the industry toward the roadmap's stated goals. For example, he notes that in a section on manufacturing process modeling and simulation in its Integrated Manufacturing Technologies Roadmap for Modeling and Simulation, published in July 2000, the Integrated Manufacturing Technology Initiative calls for the development of knowledge-based modeling tools that will ensure the design for assembly, disassembly and reassembly of products and processes.

In connection with this goal, the section identified three tasks: one that addresses the basic attributes of assembly, disassembly and reassembly processes; a second that adds such attributes as tolerance "stickups" and assembly sequences; and a third that develops product and process models that enable true design for manufacturing, including disassembly and reassembly.

Vital Planning Tool

Roadmapping activity "is becoming one of the most important planning tools in industry," Caswell said, adding that "the U.S. is the leading expertise in roadmapping development, with Canada building their expertise to be second in the world." Other countries, although with much lesser expertise in this area, according to Caswell, are Western European countries, Korea, and Israel.

Gadi Kaplan in New York City gadikaplan2001@yahoo.com