Simulation Analysis of Scheduling Rules in MEMS Manufacturing

This paper focuses on the production scheduling in MEMS (microelectromechanical system) manufacturing. The whole MEMS production process can be organized as three sub-processes, that is, the front-end process, the wafer cap process and the back-end process. As the total processing time of the frontend process is significantly longer that that of the wafer cap process, the coordination between the releases of wafers to these two sub-processes is an important issue. In this paper, three synchronization rules are developed and they are evaluated together with six dispatching rules under Poisson input. The performance measures considered are cycle times of wafers. A visual interactive simulation model is constructed to imitate the production line. The simulation results indicate that both synchronization rules and dispatching rules have significant impacts on the performance of MEMS manufacturing. Key-Words: MEMS, Scheduling, Synchronization, Dispatching, Simulation, Cycle Time