Research Of Scheduling Strategies For Batching Tools In Semiconductor Wafer Fabrication

Semiconductor wafer fabrication witness a rapid growth in recent years due to the booming applications of integrated circuits. Semiconductor wafer fabrication is one of the most complex manufacturing process till now.A semiconductor process contains several hundred process steps .Moreover, there are situations of re-entrant processes,batch processing,rework,scrap and random machine events.All of these make semiconductor wafer fabrication hard to model and schedule.Batching is an important issue in semiconductor manufacturing, while sereval lots are processed together in batching tools. The processing times of the lots on the batching tools are usually very long compared to other processes, and the prices of batching tools are very high,which lead to the situation that the bottleneck machines of semiconductor wafer fabrication are always batching tools, and scheduling strategies on batching tools may greatly affect the performance of the entire wafer fab. In this paper, we will focus on scheduling problem of batching tools.Our research on scheduling problem of batching tools in semiconductor...