Knowledge Management in the Semiconductor Industry: Dispatches from the Front Line

The semiconductor industry is characterized by products with a high level of intellectual property content, long product development cycles, designed by very scarce engineering talent. Because of the knowledge-intensive nature of the development process barriers to market entry are extremely strong. The foundation of many semiconductor company’s successes has been the research and development of new products, with a range of products being sold to thousands of customers in many different horizontal and vertical markets. There are a number of knowledge management challenges facing corporations in the semiconductor industry: how to improve the sharing of knowledge and best practices across the organization, how to quickly develop solutions to technical problems and hence reduce time-to-market, and how to accelerate innovation rates by bringing diverse views and experience to bear. This paper will describe some of these challenges. The research is based on a case study of a leading semiconductor company with worldwide operations.

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