1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to a mass production method and system in particular, to an automated mass production system and method adapted for manufacturing a non-volatile memory device.
2. Description of Related Art
Recently, because of the smaller physical size and low power dissipation characteristic, non-volatile memory, e.g., flash memory, has been used to replace the conventional magnetic disk storage media for portable electronic devices.
One of the typical applications of flash memory is in the USB electronic flash memory, which is known to be portable, low power devices utilizing Universal Serial Bus (USB) technology for interfacing between a host computer (e.g., desktop or laptop) and the USB electronic flash memory. Further, other electronic flash memory applications may take forms in many types of electronic devices including MP3 layer, cellular phone, digital camera, storage device (e.g., memory cards and solid state drive (SSD) disk), and etc.
Consequently, as the popularity of flash memory technology increase rapidly, the associated manufacturing volume increases as well. It is known to those skilled in the art that any flash memory devices before it is ready for the end user to use, series of steps of testing and formatting process must be performed. To meet the high volume of flash memory devices production, manufacturers adopt automated equipment to perform the necessary manufacturing processes such as the initiating card process.
In a typical automated flash memory device manufacturing process, a mass production tool (MP tool) is developed to coordinate with automated equipment to perform the above aforementioned manufacturing processes. However, the automated equipment for mass producing flash memory devices in practice adopts a predefined set of proprietary protocols, e.g., RS232, TCP/IP for data communication which is in general differed from the mass production tool, wherein the predefined proprietary protocols generally is set by the equipment vender. Furthermore, different automated equipment from different venders may use different data formats (such as different command names and parameters of the processing commands) for the same processing command. Consequently, code modifications must be done on the mass production tool prior to the production to have the mass production tool properly coordinated with specific automated equipment from the specific vender to establish the automated mass production process.
Moreover, in this mass production setting whenever the manufacturers need to replace the automated equipment or when the vender updates the automated equipment, the manufacturers generally have to redesign or modify the code of the mass production tool. In practice, each time the manufacturing modifies the code of the mass production tool, increases the production complexity thereby increase the production time and cost. Hence, the current set up for the flash memory device mass production system may be inefficiency and may not keep up with the increasing manufacturing volume of flash memory device production.