LED chipmaker Luxxon introduces Ares ciMes for global competitiveness

Luxxon Technology, the first Taiwan-based LED chipmaker that has earned a complete technical transfer for high-end LED chip manufacturing from international makers, has successfully introduced ciMes (Computer Integrated Manufacturing and Manufacturing Execution System) of Ares International Corp. at the start of its volume production.

With the web-based ciMes product and the successful experiences of offering consultations at LED makers by Ares professional consultants, Luxxon has swiftly established the system for factory management and used the system to automatically monitor all manufacturing activities. Consequently, newly-established Luxxon can rapidly enter volume production and achieve the goal of stable and high quality.

MES is the core system of factory management. In the starting period of Luxxon, it has deeply recognized the ability of IT system to integrate core business and procedures and providing the automation for real-time factory procedure activities monitoring. In addition, with the specific requirements of LED manufacturing, Luxxon stresses on the industry experiences of MES providers, aiming at establishing an efficient factory management system in the shortest period of time made possible by the professional consulting ability of the provider. Furthermore, Luxxon needs a system that can help solve the issues of the statistics of batch and merge volumes in the process flow as well as the tracking of original production batches of test runs before volume production. Hence, ciMes caters to the needs of Luxxon in becoming one of the third largest LED makers in Taiwan in three years and a famous global optoelectronic component supplier in five years.

Ares ciMes is developed on the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, using web-base as the technical platform, with the core idea of the product design being flexibility. Using fast parameter setting, Ares ciMes can let the customer configure their own production logic mix while reaching a flexible expansion. As such, ciMes can avoid system instability and difficulty in modifications that happen at MES systems that are developed using the client-server structure. Since Luxxon is aiming at the growth plans for the next few years, the expandability and extendibility of ciMes are right for the needs of Luxxon.

The introduction of ciMes can be divided into two stages, which last for five months. Epitaxy is the first manufacturing process and the core part of the LED industry; the quality of the epitaxy also affects strongly the optoelectronic characteristics of all end products. Ares ciMes consultants deeply understand the special needs of the optoelectronics industry and use the stable structure and fast parameter setting of ciMes to accurately set the wave length and brightness of the epitaxy at the range that cannot be recognize by the human eye. In addition, the WIP (work-in-process) feature of ciMes can not only offer online immediate messages but also deliver cross conditions and freely select export columns. Hence the user can search for production messages, enabling the production control unit to control the accurate production status.

During the implementation process, Ares used its experiences of professional consultation, coupled with the friendly, self-configurable interface of ciMes, along with complete educational trainings and support from high-level executives. As a result, the effect of the implementation is very impressive.

With the introduction of ciMes, Luxxon has established a highly-efficient management system that can accurately control the real-time information during the production process and understand all events and on-site situations during the factory manufacturing process. Every production information of the factory is transmitted to the user using the real-time report. This provides abundant assistance for the procedure of the production decision. For quality control, the automatic system monitoring helps significantly improving the stability of the product and the yields. On the other hand, the system integration ability of ciMes can combine the real-time information with ERP, bridging the gap between the enterprise and the factory.

ciMes helps Luxxon to finish the real-time and complete process trace-back and factory resources control, establishing the target for production efficiency, increasing capacity, while lowering manual errors, costs and defective rate. Consequently, Luxxon can use the automatically-monitored volume production technology to produce high-end LED chips and pushing its production quality to the first-rate level. In the future, it aims to become the most important while LED company in Taiwan and the world.

Luxxon is the subsidiary of Powerchip Semiconductor Corp. (PSC) and has technical transfer from Japan-based Mitsubishi Electric.