An Integer Linear Programming Approach for Dedicated Machine Constraint

Dedicated machine constraint is one of the new challenges introduced in photolithography machinery of the semiconductor manufacturing system due to natural bias. Previous researches either did not take the constraint into account or the proposed heuristic approach might not fit the fast-changing market of semiconductor manufacturing. In this paper, we propose a new framework for the issue of the dedicated machine constraint in semiconductor manufacturing based on an Integer Linear Program (ILP) framework. The ILP framework provides an efficient approach to minimize the producing cost and obtain a global optimal solution in an efficient time. We also present the experiments to validate the proposed approach.