Amkor Factory Intelligence Enables Industry 4.0

Amkor Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMKR), a leader in advanced packaging technologies that support high-growth markets, including smartphones and 5G, advanced automotive systems, high-performance computing and consumer IoT, recently unveiled new measures that help the company achieve Industry 4.0 initiatives, extending its leadership in quality and efficiency excellence.

Leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning and interconnected systems, Industry 4.0 challenges companies to surpass factory automation and achieve factory intelligence. The goal of factory intelligence is to improve product and service quality, decision making speed on the factory floor and utilization of high-value assets.

Amkor now uses real-time, in-process decision making to drive gains in quality, asset utilization and efficiency. The application of Industry 4.0-era tools reduces cycle times for advanced packaging processing.

“Amkor’s most advanced factories exemplify Industry 4.0,” said Umesh Manathkar, Amkor Corporate VP and CIO. “K5 in Incheon is a superb example of a factory that is truly interconnected, automated and enriched with artificial intelligence and real-time big data analytics.”

With deeply integrated systems, K5 has increased efficiency on the factory floor and throughout the manufacturing process. Amkor is now able to apply lessons learned from K5 planning, construction and operation to other facilities as they are upgraded.

Amkor aligns to an eight-pillar structure to ensure success in Industry 4.0. Five of the pillars are foundational, while three enable an intelligent factory framework. The foundational technology pillars are:

1) Autonomous machines and material handling
2) Industrial IoT for universal connectivity
3) Universal system integration with all backbone systems
4) Image analytics based on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML)
5) Big data analytics for correlating structured and unstructured data in near real time
6) Cybersecurity to protect enterprise data and intellectual property
7) Simulation to allow experimentation with manufacturing scenarios
8) Cloud computing, which enables scaling up of data gathering, analysis and decision making

By applying weighted scoring to continually monitor plant progress toward the automation goals supported and enabled by these pillars, Amkor has adopted a reliable standard for gauging Industry 4.0 readiness.

Since implementing Industry 4.0 initiatives, Amkor has seen a 60% improvement in productivity for process engineers from Engineering Data Analytics (EDA), and Fault Detection & Classification (FDC) will enable real-time quality control, which ties directly to quality improvements.