APPENDIX D. MALAYSIA SITE REPORTS (APRIL 1996 VISITS)

Site:

NatSteel Technologies - Penang, Malaysia
(see NatSteel Singapore site report for contact address)

Participants:

Cliff Chu, Vice President - Operations
Victor Ng, General Manager
Ng Hock Ching, Marketing Director
S. C. Hoon, Marketing & Business Development Manager

Mission and Strategy

• NatSteel Penang is a wholly owned subsidiary of NatSteel Electronics and has been operating since 1992 in the Penang area.
• NatSteel plans to expand its value-added services offered in Singapore to include PCB layout and wiring.
• NatSteel Penang participates on a corporate technology council.

Key Elements of Presentation

• NatSteel Penang moved to a new 160,000 ft2 two-story building in 1994 located on 9 acres of land. This includes 110,000 square feet of manufacturing space and 31,000 square feet of high bay storage.
• NatSteel Penang uses Panasert SMT equipment and had been adding one line per month at the time of the WTEC visit. It has 16 SMT lines doing 8 million placements per day and has 90% equipment utilization.
• 3 rotating shifts are run per day, 20 shifts per week; 11 inventory turns with 4.6 asset turns are achieved.

Key Elements of Tour

• When this facility was ISO-certified in March of 1995, it had spent 6 months modifying the basic procedures from Singapore to meet specific local Malaysian requirements. It also expended 8,000 hours of training deployment to prepare for this certification.
• Process yields are design-dependent but average 98% at ICT and 99% at functional.

Key Results

• Customer returns (production line plus field) are 2,000 ppm with 1,000 ppm for ASICs, 600 ppm for no fault found, 200 ppm for SMT related, and 200 ppm for ECO/test.
• Penang has failure analysis capability to the component level and utilizes Malaysian government facilities for component/IC failure analysis.

Conclusions

New SMT processes are developed in Singapore and migrated to Penang, but Penang does product startup for all products that are slated for volume production in Penang.