We describe the first set of chips to be designed and manufactured with the specific objective of use in an education environment. The chips are the result of a collaboration between educators and industry and introduce students to complex microelectronics technology by presenting simple building blocks fabricated using standard semiconductor manufacturing techniques. Current usage indicates th...

The aircraft industry is an advanced, complex technological industry that has a strong impact on other industries and, for the nation as a whole, it is a strategically important industry for strengthening international competitiveness through technological superiority. Developed countries throughout the world have been promoting the aircraft industry as an engine of continuous growth and develo...

As high technology product market becomes more dynamic and competitive, chip manufacturers need to bring products to customers in short periods of time. As a result, semiconductor fabrication plants regularly contain lots with priority status. These lots have several unique characteristics compared to other production lots, both in terms of lot transport and scheduling on tools. These lots cons...

The successful construction of evolved object designs is challenging. Physics simulators are a means to replicate the real world virtually, but phenomena such as the fabrication gap prevent certain optimized blue prints from being constructed in the real world. To circumvent this problem, we propose removing the virtual aspect from object design optimization and evolve objects solely in the phy...

In this paper, we present a comparison of five dispatching rules that aim to reduce the mean and the variance of cycle times. The performance of the dispatch rules is evaluated using simulation results for two large semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities. The results show that which dispatch rule achieves the best results depends on the fab, on the load of the fab and on the product.

Semiconductor hookup construction (i.e., constructing process tool piping systems) is critical to semiconductor fabrication plant completion. During the conceptual project phase, it is difficult to conduct an accurate cost estimate due to the great amount of uncertain cost items. This study proposes a new model for estimating semiconductor hookup construction project costs. The developed model,...

In this paper we describe a finite-capacity algorithm that can be used for production scheduling in a semiconductor wafer fabrication facility (wafer fab). The algorithm is a beam-search-type algorithm. We describe the basic features of the algorithm. The implementation of the algorithm is based on the ILOG-Solver libraries. We describe the simulation environment, which is used to evaluate the ...

A modular simulation system (MSS) for the scheduling of semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities (fabs) is discussed. Firstly, the general structure model (GSM) for modeling a semiconductor wafer fab, composed of a configurable definition layer, a physical layer, a process information layer and a scheduling layer, is proposed. Secondly, a data-based dynamic modeling method is given. Thirdly, ...