High-fidelity rapid prototyping of 300 mm fabs through discrete event system modeling

Traditionally, the semiconductor manufacturing industry has been driven by continuous technological advancement of the underlying production processes. Yet, as the industry matures, mere technology development is no longer sufficient. The effective deployment and exploitation of the system production capacity and operational capability become critical for competitive success. Hence, currently, there is an increasing interest towards the development of a control paradigm / framework that will allow the effective and efficient deployment and operation of contemporary fabs, including the upcoming 300mm fab. The research program presented in this paper seeks to define a detailed modeling and control framework for the real-time 300mm fab operations, by exploiting and integrating emerging results in Discrete Event Systems theory. The proposed approach is demonstrated through a small-scale example, modeling the operation of a 300mm fab bay. Furthermore, in addition to the development of the formal specification, the presented program will also implement the proposed fab modeling and control framework in a Web-based simulation platform, that will function as a fab (re-)configuration and control synthesis tool for the fab control engineer, and as an educational tool for manufacturing system modeling and control.