Related to the inherent complexities and costs associated with building a brand new chip, fabless chip manufacturers are under constant pressure to improve operating efficiencies while, at the same time, satisfying OEM customer requirements. As such, large OEM customers requesting personalization, customer specific data preparation and feature customization of standard parts challenge the chipmakers ability to minimize inventory overhead and improve operating efficiencies.
Customer specific personalization services may be accomplished with a high degree of visibility and audit tracking controls that are secured by the CryptoManager solution for each step in the manufacturing supply chain.
For example (see Figure 1), if three OEM customers of a SoC manufacturer each request different feature configurations and/or data preparations for a standard SoC product, the SoC manufacturer needs to figure out how to support three customerspecific part types without creating three different SKUs.
Device personalization creates complexity in manufacturing and in inventory management. With multiple SKUs for standard products, managing inventory for each step requires accurate forecasts and discrepancies can result in wasted silicon or delays in fulfilling orders (see Figure 2)
In this case, pushing the personalization processing step to the end of the manufacturing flow just prior to or, in some cases after delivery to the customer, mitigates the impact on inventory and operations (See 3).