• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.443-451
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• 2001

This paper addresses an on-line scheduling method for track systems in semiconductor fabrication. A track system is a clustered equipment performing photolithography process in semiconductor fabrication. Trends toward high automation and flexibility in the track systems accelerate the necessity of the intelligent controller that can guarantee reliability and optimize productivity of the track systems. This paper proposes an-efficient on-line scheduling method that can avoid deadlock inherent to track systems and optimize the productivity. We employ two procedures for the on-line scheduling. First, we define potential deadlock set to apply deadlock avoidance policy efficiently. After introducing the potential deadlock set, we propose a deadlock avoidance policy using an on-line Gantt chart, which can generate optimal near-optimal schedule without deadlock. The proposed on-line scheduling method is shown to be efficient in handling deadlock inherent to the track systems through simulation.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.29 no.11 s.242
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• pp.1463-1471
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• 2005

This paper proposes an agent-based scheduling method fur semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities with hard inter-operation temporal constraints. The scheduling problem is to find the feasible schedules that guarantee both logical and temporal correctness. A proposed multi-agent based architecture is composed of scheduling agents, workcell agents, and machine agents. A scheduling agent computes optimal schedules through bidding mechanisms with a subset or entire set of the workcell agents. A dynamic planning-based approach is adopted for the scheduling mechanism so that the dynamic behaviors such as aperiodic job arrivals and reconfiguration can be taken into consideration.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.153-161
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• 2016

Semiconductor manufacturing has suffered from the complex process behavior of the technology oriented control in the production line. While the technological processes are in charge of the quality and the yield of the product, the operational management is also critical for the productivity of the manufacturing line. The fabrication line in the semiconductor manufacturing is considered as the most complex part because of various kinds of the equipment, re-entrant process routing and various product devices. The efficiency and the productivity of the fabrication line may give a significant impact on the subsequent processes such as the probe line, the assembly line and final test line. In the management of the re-entrant process such as semiconductor fabrication, it is important to keep balanced fabrication line. The Performance measures in the fabrication line are throughput, cycle time, inventory, shortage, etc. In the fabrication, throughput and cycle time are the conflicting performance measures. It is very difficult to achieve two conflicting goal simultaneously in the manufacturing line. The capacity of equipment is important factor in the production planning and scheduling. The production planning consideration of capacity can make the scheduling more realistic. In this paper, an input and scheduling rule are to achieve the balanced operation in semiconductor fabrication line through equipment capacity and workload are proposed and evaluated. New backward projection and scheduling rule consideration of facility capacity are suggested. Scheduling wafers on the appropriate facilities are controlled by available capacity, which are determined by the workload in terms of the meet the production target.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.266-279
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• 2009

This paper focuses on the problem of scheduling wafer lots with limited waiting times between pairs of consecutive operations in a semiconductor wafer fabrication facility. For the problem of minimizing total tardiness of orders, we develop a priority rule based scheduling method in which a scheduling decision for an operation is made based on the states of workstations for the operation and its successor or predecessor operation. To evaluate performance of the suggested scheduling method, we perform simulation experiments using real factory data as well as randomly generated data sets. Results of the simulation experiments show that the suggested method performs better than a method suggested in other research and the one that has been used in practice.

• IE interfaces
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.437-447
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• 1999

Modeling and system development for the fabrication process in the semiconductor manufacturing is presented in this paper. Maximization of wafer production can be achieved by the wafer flow balance under high utilization of bottleneck machines. Relatively simpler model is developed for the fabrication line by considering main characteristics of logistics. Simulation system is developed to evaluate the line performance such as balance rate, utilization, WIP amount and wafer production. Scheduling rules and input rules are suggested, and tested on the simulation system. We have shown that there exists good combination of scheduling and input rules.

• IE interfaces
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.115-128
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• 1998

This paper presents a development of operation scheduling and reactive operation scheduling system for hull fabrication. The methodology for implementing operation scheduling system is HHGA(Hierarchical Hybrid Genetic Algorithm) which exploits both the global perspective of the genetic algorithm and the rapid convergence of the heuristic search for operation scheduling. The methodology for the reactive operation scheduling is the revised HHGA which consists of manual schedule editor for occurrence of exceptional events and the revised scheduling method used in operation scheduling. As the results of experiment, it has been confirmed that HHGA is able to search good operation scheduling within reasonable time, and the revised HHGA is able to search load-balanced reactive operation scheduling with minimum changes of initial operation schedule within short period of time.

• IE interfaces
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.1-13
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• 1997

반도체 Wafer Fabrication 공정은 무수한 공정과 복잡한 Lot의 흐름 등으로 다른 제조 형태에 비해 효율적인 관리가 대단히 어려운 부문이다. 본 연구는 반도체 Fab을 대상으로 주어진 생산 소요량과 목표 공기를 효율적으로 달성하기 위한 Shift 단위의 생산 일정계획을 대상으로 하였다. 특히, 전 공정 및 장비를 고려하기보다는 Bottleneck인 Photo 공정의 Stepper를 중심으로, 공정을 Layer단위로 묶어, 한 Shift에서 어떻게 Stepper를 할당하고 생산계획을 할 것인가를 결정하기 위한 2단계 방법론을 제시하고, Stepper 할당 및 계획에 필요한 3가지 알고리즘들을 제시하였다. 이 기법들을 소규모의 예제들에 대해 적용한 결과와 최적해와의 비교를 통하여 그 성능을 평가하였다.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.63-71
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• 2003

This paper analyses a deterministic scheduling problem concerned with manufacturing multiple types of components at a pre-assembly stage composed of parallel fabrication machines. Each component part is machined on a fabrication machine specified in advance. The manufactured components are subsequently assembled into products. The completion time of a job(product) is measured by the latest completion time of its all components at the pre-assembly stage. The problem has the objective measure of minimizing the total weighted completion time of a finite number of jobs. Two lower bounds are derived and tested in a branch-and-bound scheme. Also, three constructive heuristic algorithms are developed based on the machine aggregation and greedy strategies. Some empirical evaluation of the performance of the proposed branch-and-bound and heuristic algorithms are also performed.

• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.45-54
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• 2010

The inherent complexity of semiconductor fabrication processes makes it hard to solve well-known job scheduling problems in analytical ways, which leads us to rely practically on discrete event modeling simulations to learn the effects of changing the system's parameters. Meanwhile, unpredictable disturbances such as machine failures and maintenance diminish the productivity of semiconductor manufacturing processes with fixed scheduling policies; thus, it is necessary to adapt job scheduling policy in a timely manner in reaction to critical environmental changes (disturbances) in order for the fabrication process to perform optimally. This paper proposes an adaptive job control framework for a wafer fabrication process in a control system theoretical approach and implements it based on a DEVS modeling simulation environment. The proposed framework has the advantages in view of the whole systems understanding and flexibility of applying new rules compared to most ad-hoc software approaches in this field. Furthermore, it is flexible enough to incorporate new job scheduling rules into the existing rule set. Experimental results show that this control framework with adaptive rescheduling outperforms fixed job scheduling algorithms.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.357-369
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• 1995

Wafer fabrication process is the most important and critical process in semiconductor manufacturing. The process is very complicated and hard to establish an efficient schedule due to its complexity. Furthermore, several performance indices such as due dates, throughput, cycle time and workstation utilizations are to be considered simultaneously for an efficient schedule, and some of these indices have negative correlations in performances each other. We develop an efficient heuristic scheduling algorithm; Hybrid Input Control Policy and Hybrid Dispatching Rule. Through numerical experiments, it is shown that the proposed Hybrid Scheduling Algorithm gives better performance compared with existing algorithms.