dc.description.abstract | After nearly 40 years of development, Taiwan′s quartz frequency component industry now has a declining growth rate and is no longer a highly-explosive growing industry. In the past two years, as the 5G technology have been developed, many countries have started to launch the infrastructure construction which is related to the base stations. From core networks to micro base stations till the wide application of consumer products, they will boost a great demand for frequency components which turns around the declining market has become a new growing momentum of this industry.
From the perspective of supply-demand trend on the market, the reason that quartz frequency component industry can bottom out lies in the design of the device which can realize high-velocity, high-frequency and low-delay in data return to the base station. This technology has brought new business opportunities to the industry. Together with the high-tech automotive electronics and the miniaturization of frequency components, Taiwan′s quartz frequency component industry has come back to life. Since 2019, this case company has invested a lot of capitals to improve the production capacity and product quality. Besides expanding the production lines of miniaturized products, the company will also introduce the wafer-level packaging process, which will help the company to develop advanced miniaturized products.
At present, the company’s manufacturing capacity of quartz chip can not meet the demands of the downstream manufacturers. In the case of this company, the main bottleneck of the quartz chip production capacity are mainly at chip cutting, size cutting and frequency sorting. Without a significant increase in manpower and machine, the company need to transfer and purchase semi-self-made chips from its internal plants (Ningbo plant and Chongqing plant) to reduce the influence caused by capacity gap in quartz chip production temporarily. However, the semi-self-made chips are normally frequency chips or glued chips, which have to be glued on chip rows and then go to the follow-up process via the round-edging stage. In other words, the etching stage and frequency sorting stage are two main bottleneck. because they can not be transferred or purchased from other internal plants. It is necessary to improve and optimize internal processes to meet customer’s needs.
This research will examine the current production situation of the company by introducing the lean manufacturing method, and improve the project through the core concepts, such as waste reduction and value stream mapping. | en_US |