Load Balancing among Photolithography Machines in Semiconductor Manufacturing

Shr, Arthur M. D.; Liu, Alan; Chen, Peter P.

doi:10.1109/is.2006.348439

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Balance rate was defined as the ratio of WIP difference between actual and target, and the machine with high rate was dispatched first. To tackle the load balancing issue in the semiconductor manufacturing system, a novel model, Resource Schedule and Execution Matrix, was presented to easily schedule the wafer lots by using a simple two-dimensional matrix representing activities of tasks in the factory [7]. The wafer lot with the biggest wait steps was assigned to the smallest load litho machine.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this problem, seven layers of one product are to be scheduled on eleven machines and seventy-one reticles within 411 time slots. The problem is first solved with linearized objective function (14) and constraints (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13). Then it's solved with different modification of constraints involving layer load and processing time requirements.…”

Section: B Practical Size Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

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Optimization-based litho machine scheduling with load balancing and reticle expiration

Yan

Chen²,

Luh

et al. 2012

2012 IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE)

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The increasing demand for on-time delivery is forcing semiconductor manufacturers to seek more efficient schedules of machines and other resources to meet targets while making effective use of excess capacities. This paper presents the modeling and solution methodology of lithography machine scheduling with load balancing and reticle expiration consideration for the bottleneck process of semiconductor fabrication. A mixed-integer optimization model is established with capacity constraints and processing requirements. The objective is to meet daily targets, to keep load balancing, to avoid reticles shortage, and to reduce the number of machine setups. The problem formulated above is solved by the branch-and-cut method. Although the formulation is linearized, the practical size problem is still difficult to solve because the convex hull is hard to obtain. To overcome efficiency difficulty, some constraints are modified. To further improve efficiency, a two-phase model is established. The higher phase is to reduce the problem range by relaxing some constraints, and the lower phase is for scheduling. Numerical testing shows that the method can generate high quality schedules within reasonable time.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: B Practical Size Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

Optimization-based litho machine scheduling with load balancing and reticle expiration

Yan

Chen²,

Luh

et al. 2012

2012 IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE)

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“…The FSS uses the Resource Schedule and Execution Matrix (RSEM) [4,5,6,7,8,9] to manipulate the scheduling process. The fuzzy scheduling model is presented in this Section…”

Section: Fuzzy Scheduling Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Fuzzy Scheduling System for Dedicated Machine Constraint

Shr¹,

Liu²,

Cheng³

2006

Proceedings of the 9th Joint International Conference on Information Sciences (JCIS-06)

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In this paper, we propose the Fuzzy Scheduling System (FSS) to deal with the dedicated machine constraint. The constraint of having a dedicated machine for photolithography process is the new issue introduced in photolithography machinery due to natural bias. If we randomly schedule the wafer lots to arbitrary photolithography machines at the first photolithography stage, then the load of all photolithography machines might become unbalanced. It is the main contributor to the complexity and uncertainty of the semiconductor factory. The FSS is to select the best photolithograph machines for each wafer lot at the first, unconstrained, stage to tackle this dedicated machine constraint and to maintain the load balancing among photolithography machines.

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“…We have proposed the heuristic Load Balancing (LB) scheduling (Shr et al, 2006a) (Shr et al, 2006b) (Shr et al, 2006c) and Multiagent Scheduling System (MSS) (Shr, et al 2006d) approaches to provide solutions to the issue of dedicated photolithography machine constraint. The dedicated photolithography machine constraint, which is caused by the natural bias of the photolithography machine, is a new challenge in the semiconductor manufacturing systems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%