MODELING THE WAFER TRANSPORTATION PROBLEM IN A SEMICONDUCTOR FABRICATION FACILITY



Jairo R. Montoya TORRES1, Hélène MARIAN1, Jean-Pierre CAMPAGNE2
1Centre SIMMO – Dept. MSGI Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Etienne 158, Cours Fauriel 42028 Saint-Etienne Cedex 2, France E-mail: {montoya, marian}@emse.fr
2Laboratoire PRISMa Institut National de Sciences Appliquée de Lyon 20, avenue Albert Einstein 69621 Villeurbanne Cedex, France E-mail: campagne@gprhp.insa-lyon.fr


ABSTRACT: The design and management of a wafer fabrication facility is a very hard task because the manufacturing process needs a large amount of re-entrant operation sequences. Besides, for the new 300mm wafer generation, ergonomic and productivity reasons impose the use of an automated material handling system to transfer wafer lots between operations. The point is now to model and to optimize performance parameters and control logic (i.e. routing and scheduling rules) in order to improve system's productivity. In such a context, this paper studies the wafer transportation problem in a semiconductor fabrication facility. First of all, we shortly describe the production process as a way to understand its complexity. Secondly, we propose an analytical model of this problem.

KEYWORDS: Automated material handling systems, modeling, mathematical programming, wafer manufacturing.


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