Virtual fab: an enabling framework and dynamic manufacturing service provision mechanism

The concepts of a virtual fab (VF) and manufacturing service (MS) have been proposed over recent years as a way to face the fierce competition of the semiconductor industry. This paper proposes a way to build a VF with a flexible manufacturing service in a highly specialized and uncertain environment. The VF enabling framework contains manufacturing service, business process (BP), and infrastructure (IR) layers. A novel dynamic manufacturing service provision mechanism (DMSPM) was designed to compose objects flexibly among the three layers of the various manufacturing services. The skeleton of the scheme includes name mapping, business process binding, resource reservation binding, and manufacturing service management binding to allow flexible service composition. To assess the feasibility and potential of the framework and our DMSPM, an order commitment service (OCS) provided by a foundry fab was used as an example. A prototype system was designed and implemented to demonstrate that current IT, CASE tools, a fab information infrastructure, and data/information availability make DMSPM readily realizable and that it has good possibilities in VF and e-business developments.