Priority-Based Tool Capacity Allocation in the Foundry Fab

facilities. This paper shows a new approach to allocate the short-term capacities of tools for tool groups. A virtual unit, tool group, is used to represent the group of tools in semiconductor foundry. Hence, a tool may belong to several tool groups because it may be handle several kinds of recipes. The coupling relation between the tools and the tool groups is a complex many-to-many relation. This paper aims to decide the tool-dispatching rule in tool capacity allocation. The term, “priority-based”, is two-fold. One is to prioritize the lots in the fab, the other is to prioritize the tools in the correlated tool groups. The priority-based algorithm is used to estimate the tool utilization, bottleneck, tool-sharing in the tool groups, throughput of the tool groups and WIP (Work In Process) in a specific day. The proposed algorithm is 2.1 applied to a real foundry fab and the results show that planning maximum fuzzy candidative ratio is better than other rules. Assigning the release policy, allocating tools’ Besides, a demonstration shows that the supervisor can capacities, and deciding a best lot-dispatching rule are the find the bottleneck tools by the proposed algorithm and main decisions in the foundry fab.The order release plan release the bottleneck by adding the right tools. depends on the due date of the lots and capacities of the