No abstract

Equipment throughput is one of the most critical parameters for production planning and scheduling, which is often derived by optimization techniques to achieve business goals. However, in semiconductor manufacturing, up-to-date and reliable equipment throughput is not easy to estimate and maintain because of the high complexity and extreme amount of data in the production systems. This article concerns the development and implementation of a throughput management system tailored for a semiconductor wafer fabrication plant (Fab). A brief overview of the semiconductor manufacturing and an introduction of the case Fab are presented first. Then, we focus on the system architecture and some concepts of crucial modules. This study also describes the project timescales and difficulties and discusses both tangible and intangible benefits from this project.

Communication systems usually adopted different encoding structures of convolutional codes (CCs) and turbo codes (TCs). This Letter proposes a unified encoder embedded trellis router (UEETR) to support various decoding of single-binary/double-binary (SB/DB) CC and TC encoding structures with a small hardware overhead. Furthermore, a lowlatency UEETR and a hardware-shared radix-4 UEETR are explored to reduce initial setting time and to support radix-4 SB/DB CC and TC decoding, respectively. In addition, a flexible decoding kernel with a small area cost of proposed UEETR has been implemented by a 90-nm process.