A colored Petri net-based approach to the design of 300 mm wafer fab controllers

As the effective deployment of system production capacity and operational capability becomes critical for competitive semiconductor manufacturing, there is an increasing interest toward the development of a control framework which allows effective and efficient operation of the emerging 300 mm wafer fabs. In the paper, a colored Petri net-based approach is taken to develop such a distributed event-driven 300 mm fab controller. The key element of the proposed controller design is the distribution of control function, to the constituent components of the 300 mm fab, while maintaining the logical correctness and efficiency of the fab behavior. Furthermore, in order to achieve the viability of the resulting control scheme, the proposed approach seeks to incorporate detailed operational characteristics of the 300 mm fabs, including batching, setups, reworks, maintenance, machine failures, and complex resource allocation dynamics due to the routing flexibility and auxiliary resource sharing. The proposed approach is demonstrated through a small-scale example, modeling the operation of a 300 mm fab bay.