The Operational Optimization of Semiconductor Research and Development Fabs by FAB-wide Scheduling

Semiconductor research and development(R&D) fabs are very different than production fabs in many ways such as the scales of production, job priority, production methods, and performance measures. Efficient operations of R&D fabs are very important to the development of new product, process stability, high yield, and ultimately company competitiveness. This paper proposes the fab-wide scheduling method for operational optimization of the R&D fabs. Most scheduling systems of semiconductor fabs have only focused on maximizing throughput of each separated areas without considering WIP(works in process) flows of entire fab. In this paper, we proposes the a fab-wide scheduling system which schedules all lots to entire fab equipment at once. We develop the MIP(mixed integer programing) model which allocates the lots to production equipment considering many constraints of all processes and the CP(constraint programming) model which determines the sequences of the lots in the production equipment. The proposed FAB-wide scheduling model is applied to the newly constructed R&D fab. As a result, we have accomplished the system based automated job reservation, decrease of the hot lot delay, increase of the queue time satisfaction, the high throughput by maximizing the batch sizes, decrease of the WIP TAT(Turn Around Time).