Agile Flow Control In Semiconductor Manufacturing: Simulation And Animation Demonstration

Factory flow control seeks to optimize operational performance by reducing production cycle time, work-in-process, and increasing throughput. We will use an animation-based discrete event simulator to highlight the current operational problems and discuss the possible improvement through the choices of wafer release method, lot size and buffer size. A hypothetical implant operation which consists of seven process steps is used as an example. It will be shown that the optimized pull system has a 10 times improvement in both cycle time and work-in-process inventory without sacrificing throughput compared to the current "push and balanced" system.