Production planning in semiconductor wafer fab considering variable cycle times

Recent research in the semiconductor manufacturing area has addressed some industrial engineering and operations research applications to solve the challenging production planning and scheduling problems. Relative to the other industries, the number of practical production management techniques and supporting software in the semiconductor industry is limited. The conventional models proposed use fixed or averaged cycle time and yield to get the results. However, in the actual wafer fabs, cycle time is spread widely and skewed due to the large variations in the operations. Therefore, the use of averaged cycle time and yield makes significant differences between the plan and the actual shop performance. Thus, we focus on the production planning problem in the wafer fabrication (“fab”), introducing a planning methodology that explicitly considers the variable cycle time and the shop status. We also evaluate some different types of input policies.