HORIBA STEC

Semiconductor equipment spending is mounting a strong recovery on the strength of explosive chip demand for work-at-home and study-at-home electronics fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the growth, the 2017-2018 memory boon that triggered a critical subsystems shortage is still fresh on the minds of equipment suppliers as they worry whether critical subsystem providers can keep pace with the rebounding chip industry while managing the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.Hideyuki Koishi, president of HORIBA STEC, Co., Ltd., a leading supplier of mass flow controllers (MFCs), one subsystem critical to semiconductor production, recently spoke with SEMI about the company’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak, the pandemic’s impact on the global supply chain and the company’s ability to meet the demand for MFCs. SEMI: What COVID-19 countermeasures has HORIBA STEC taken?Koishi: To ensure employee safety and security while maintaining a stable supply of products to our customers, we started to deploy company-wide countermeasures when the Japan government declared a nationwide state of emergency to curb COVID-19 infections on April 16.HORIBA STEC and the entire HORIBA group formed a global COVID-19 task force and centralized all local outbreak decision-making to drive a rapid and effective global response. We quickly implemented work-at-home practices for our office staff and provided a safe environment for our factory workers, who are essential to maintaining product supplies, by establishing social distancing protocols and restricting site visits to essential workers. We also distributed face masks to all employees and placed disinfectant dispensers near the door of every room so employees could wash their hands before entering.To help on-site employees follow our social distancing guidelines, we reduced seating at cafeterias and converted meeting rooms to offices to give employees ample work space. We also established invisible walls in manufacturing facilities with multiple collocated divisions to restrict workers to their assigned areas, a containment measure that helps with social distancing while minimizing the risk of an entire factory shutdown if a worker contracts the virus. SEMI: Have you experienced supply chain disruptions due to COVID-19 outbreak?Koishi: Even though our supply chain extends overseas and includes China, fortunately we have not experienced any significant disruptions thanks to the broad geographic distribution of our supply chain. In addition, because many of our critical components are sourced in Japan, pandemic-related impacts to our business have been limited.Long before the COVID-19 outbreak, we organized a community called Rakuraku-kai with our suppliers in Japan to build and maintain close relationships. Although the community name suggests it is exclusive to Kyoto-based suppliers, its reach is a nationwide. After the declaration of state of emergency in June, the supplier community gathered for an ad hoc meeting to exchange information and share perspectives on the COVID-19 crisis.SEMI: Did you have any pandemic protocols in place before the COVID-19 outbreak?Koishi: In 2014, HORIBA group launched Stained Glass, a project designed to increase workforce diversity at HORIBA group companies through initiatives such as placing more women in decision-making roles and encouraging working at home to help employees better balance job demands with their family lives. As part of Good Place, the project’s program to increase the work-at-home rate, HORIBA group deployed a web-based meeting system and encouraged workers to transition from physical to online meetings. Good Place has helped our IT team and workers smoothly implement our work-at-home practices.Working at home is a beneficial practice regardless of its effectiveness in curbing infections. Employees can reduce commute time, increasing their quality. And it’s much easier and more affordable for international participants to join meetings since they’re spared the time and cost of travel. This year HORIBA group also moved its three-day bi-annual global meeting online to make them safer and more economical. The meeting is attended by about 100 leaders of group companies and business units.SEMI: Do you have any concerns about meeting demand for mass flow controllers?Koishi: We doubled the capacity of our main mass flow controller factory in Kumamoto prefecture in 2018 and with more floor space available for further expansion, we see no major barriers to meeting the growing demand from international customers in 2021 and beyond. Nonetheless, we must sustain the best possible COVID-19 countermeasures to maintain production while ensuring the safety of our employees.SEMI: Are you make any social contributions to combat the virus?Koishi: Semiconductors are not only indispensable for the electronics behind remote work, education and healthcare but they also play a critical role in developing COVID-19 therapies and vaccines. Thus, at HORIBA STEC, we believe our most important contribution is to maintain steady a supply of our mass flow controllers and other key semiconductor equipment components.HORIBA group also participates in two important pandemic initiatives. The Open COVID-19 Declaration program calls on intellectual property owners to make their patent rights, utility model rights, design rights and copyrights freely available in the fight against COVID-19. The program’s sole purpose is to stop the spread of COVID-19. HORIBA is among the 20 founders1 of this initiative.In June, HORIBA joined a push by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) to develop a simple and rapid COVID-19 antibody test chip system. We’re contributing our expertise in immunoassay analysis and clinical laboratory equipment to help develop the system. SEMI: What have you learned from the COVID-19 outbreak?Koishi: The COVID-19 crisis has posed unprecedented challenges. Everyone hopes to return to normal soon but in reality things will never be exactly the same as before the crisis.Japan might have lagged other countries in its use of IT to improve business efficiency, but as we deal with the new coronavirus, both companies and their employees have been tirelessly considering reforms to the way we work through digitalization. I believe it will be difficult for companies to survive in the new normal unless they can incorporate these types of changes into their operations.On the other hand, I've also been reminded of the importance of traditional, analog communication. While we conducted all of our hiring interviews online this year, face-to-face meetings are a much richer experience that gives the prospective employee and the hiring company a much better sense of each other. In addition, as a company we need to continue to improve our ability to supply products so we can overcome challenges like the pandemic. COVID-19 has taught us our change needs to be more robust. We also need to evolve our business continuity plan to extend well beyond countermeasures to natural disasters such as typhoons and earthquakes. What matters most is that we apply the lessons of COVID-19 to make our business more resilient.[1] Ajinomoto Co., Inc., Canon Inc., Chanel G.K., GenoConcierge Kyoto, Inc., Honda Motor Co., Ltd., Horiba, Ltd., Konica Minolta Inc., Kyoto University, LSI Medience Corporation, Mitsui Knoledge Industry Co., Ltd., NEC Solution Innovators, Ltd., Nikon Corporation, Nissan Motor Co., Ltd., Rohm Co., Ltd., SRL, Inc., Shimadzu Corporation, Teijin Limited., Toyota Motor Corporation, Tsubakimoto Chain Co., and Yahoo Japan Corporation.Yoichiro Ando is a marketing staff member at SEMI Japan.

Wedged among four major tectonic plates, Japan is at the mercy of their abrupt herculean shifts and the earthquakes and tsunamis they can trigger. The fallout can be devastating. The magnitude 9 Great East Japan (Tohoku) temblor in 2011 and ensuing tsunami took nearly 20,000 lives, destroyed 138,000 buildings and cost $360 billion in economic damage.Factories including silicon wafer production facilities owned by Shin-Etsu Chemical and MEMC Electronic Materials – together accounting for 25 percent of the global silicon wafer production – sustained heavy damage. Operations were suspended. The Kumamoto earthquake in 2016 also caused significant damage. The economic cost: as much as $7.5 billion.With disaster risk rising on a global scale, these calamities offer valuable lessons in disaster preparedness and how companies can draw from their experiences to strengthen business continuity planning (BCP).Earthquake experiences and lessons in BCP were the focus of the recent SEMI Japan Members Day as speakers from five semiconductor device and equipment manufacturers offered their BCP strategies to about 150 SEMI members. Following are key takeaways from their presentations. Renesas: Create a robust production plant that is hard to break and easy to fixRenesas Semiconductor Manufacturing’s Naka plant took about 80 days to resume production while its ability to deliver semiconductors was delayed even longer as it recovered from damage caused by the Tohoku earthquake, said Yoshiyuki Miyamoto, Representative Director and President at Renesas. Operations at the company’s Kawajiri plant were disrupted by the Kumamoto earthquake.A key lesson from both earthquakes: The company needed to promote risk visualization from top-to-bottom in the supply chain. With the goal of making its plants easy to repair but hard to break down, Renesas implemented a risk management plan for earthquake preparedness plan to ensure stronger production line resistance and a stable supply to customers. The company ran simulations of multiple earthquake scenarios including aftershocks, enabling it to develop new BCP training and preparedness measures. Sony: Staying transparent about the disaster, sharing and interacting with related companiesYukihide Keigo, a representative from the Sony Semiconductor Manufacturing, showed footage taken the day the Kumamoto earthquake damaged a production line at its Kumamoto Technology Center. Sony is the top manufacturer of imaging sensors worldwide, and the Kumamoto plant is the backbone of that production. The magnitude of the foreshock fell within levels Sony had accounted for in its BCP at that time, and the line was expected to return to full production within a week. However, the magnitude of the earthquake that followed outstripped expectations, and the company’s BCP didn’t hold up. Three and a half months later, the plant had finally fully recovered. The protracted recovery prompted Sony to develop an earthquake preparedness plan using a model that assumed double the magnitude of expectations. For full restoration, the company identified challenges to returning to full operation at each stage of the production line. Then it went even further, developing in-house diagnostics, implementing critical path methods and strengthening earthquake resistance of equipment that manages bottlenecks for the restart of the plant. The revision of its BCP plan led to the establishment of a system to shorten the resumption of production after a major earthquake to just two months.Sony shared the contents of its BCP review with other companies to solicit help identifying any gaps and highlighted its partnership with Renesas in the Semiconductor Industry Association in Japan (JSIA), a committee of the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association (JEITA), to share materials procurement resources for the purposes of disaster preparedness and business continuity. HORIBA STEC: Steady daily practices protect hundreds of millions of yen worth of products HORIBA STEC’s Aso plant, near the epicenter of the Kumamoto earthquake, suffered heavy damage that cut off electricity and the water supply, yet production in its clean room resumed in just 10 days, said Hiroyuki Koyama, a factory manager at the plant. The plant’s quick recovery stemmed from daily preventive measures implemented before the quake such as connecting freestanding shelves for greater stability, applying thick rubber bands as rails to prevent manufactured goods from falling to the floor, and placing equipment on rolling carriages instead of fixed shelves.The practices saved the Aso plant hundreds of millions of yen in products and materials that otherwise could have been lost in the earthquake. Koyama also offered the reminder that, with regulations governing factory layout and construction differing widely depending on factors such as a building’s age, companies need to tailor their BCPs to the unique characteristics of each building. THK: The key point of dampening earthquakesTHK’s ACE Division develops earthquake dampening and vibration control devices designed to absorb the vibrational energy of an earthquake, though the devices must also be designed for precise analysis of that energy, said Hidemi Murao. Murao provided an overview of the latest technologies and products for dampening earthquake vibrations and shared test results from experimental devices.Murao described how THK’s recently introduced Linear Motion (LM) Guide, an earthquake vibration dampening technology, can significantly reduce building vibrations during a temblor. In a video Murao showed to demonstrate how the guide works, a shelf loaded with equipment rests on a platform equipped with THK’s LM Guide equipment. Simulating an earthquake, the platform shakes vigorously in every direction but the shelf remains steady as the LM Guide dampens the vibrations. The platforms can be installed on floors or underground in buildings or factories to prevent shelves from toppling. Tokyo Electron: The ideal BCP management systemOne risk associated with BCP training is that it can become overly routine, dulling the response of employees in actual disasters, said Tokyo Electron Vice President Tatsuya Aso. To help keep its workers’ skills sharp, TEL held surprise drills with employees assigned to particular BCP roles to test their ability to adapt quickly to when disaster strikes. In addition, TEL has launched surveys in more than 70 overseas locations to optimize safety in these high-hazard facilities.The SEMI Japan Members Day presentations made clear that the issue of BCP transcends boundaries between individuals, manufacturers, regions, and sectors within the global electronics supply chain. Disaster preparedness requires problem-solving across the entire supply chain, with companies sharing technical knowledge, offering mutual aid, and striving for continual improvement. Collaborative is essential. At SEMICON Japan 2019, SEMI will continue to bring companies together to address BCP initiatives and share their technical knowledge with members. Jim Hamajima is president of SEMI Japan.