In this paper we discuss the concept and design criteria for a framework that facilitates the performance assessment of shop-floor control systems. Our basic concept includes a simulation model that emulates the shop-floor of a wafer fab, sends information to the control system, and receives information back from the control system. The shop-floor control system is realized as a separate module...

This paper presents a comprehensive framework for strategic capacity expansion of production equipment in semiconductor manufacturing, and the proposed approach is applied on a model of an actual wafer fabrication facility. It is the intention of this work to show that, once intelligently integrated, an analytical queueing model and a numeric computer simulation model can be used synergisticall...

In 1991, IBM San Jose decided to produce and sell magnetic heads for computer disk drives on the open market to original equipment manufacturers. However, as IBM's wafer fabrication facility increased the number of products it manufactured, its manufacturing cycle time lengthened. Since cycle time is important in competing in the open market, IBM San Jose formed a study team (in cooperation wit...

In this paper, we examine the cycle time and on-time delivery performance of a semiconductor wafer fabrication facility (wafer fab) under critical ratio (CR) dispatch regime. It turns out that determining appropriate due dates for this rule is a critical task. We provide a detailed analysis of the wafer fab behavior for a large range of due date values. From the results of the experiments we de...

In this paper, we exploit the speed of an ordinal optimization (OO)-based simulation tool designed by Hsieh et al. to investigate dynamic selection of scheduling rules for semiconductor wafer fabrication (fab). Although a scheduling rule is a combination of loading wafer release and dispatching rules, this paper specifically focuses on dispatching when significant amount of wafers-in-process (W...

The tool portfolio of a plant refers to the makeup, in quantity and type, of processing machines in the plant. Portfolio planning is a multi-criteria decisiontnaking task involving trade-offs among investment cost, throughput, cycle time and risk. In this paper, an economic decision model is first presented for optimal configuration of portfolio and to determine optimal factory loading. I f pla...

This paper is presentation of resulting physical models that were used to explore the relationship between design modeling in CAD and digital fabrication with plywood sheets. We explored a process in making tabletop models with digital fabrication machines and thin plywood sheets. Each was built from combination of predetermined wood joining techniques and structures. These models are believed ...

Contemporary factories in capital intensive industries such as semiconductor manufacturing are very complex, with many sources of risk. The highly competitive and global business environment forces companies to analyze, design, and continuously re-design factories with distributed multidisciplinary teams. Traditional factory design approaches using spreadsheets and stand-alone simulations canno...

Today’s wafer fabrication plants must carefully balance the need to increase productivity while simultaneously reducing variable costs. There are a couple of main areas where process control (metrology and inspection) equipment can help minimize variable cost. The first is reducing consumables – minimizing the number of wafers that are processed for non-revenue operations, i.e., test wafers. Se...

In this study, we examine how wafer start peaks affect the performance of a semiconductor wafer fabrication facility. In contrast to other publications, we use a real factory model. In addition, we created two new types of analysis particularly suited for transient phases. The t-test diagram and the disturbance index provide useful support in finding disturbances in the factory and measuring th...