Simulation for dedicated line small lot size manufacturing

With the speedup of product innovation, product life cycles are becoming shorter and shorter. To fully support customers, a foundry fab has to speed up its wafer-output schedule to shorten the time to market in the growth stage. High priority setting and small lot strategy are common techniques for accelerating manufacturing cycle time. However, small lot strategy would accompany 1.2% of extra equipment investment. The improvement should be sufficient so that the extra investment is worthy. Therefore, the novel strategy, dedicated line for small lot size manufacturing, is proposed in this paper, which allocates exclusive resources for expediting lots to greatly improve the manufacturing cycle time. By distinguishing dedicated lines from regular lines, the proposed strategy improves 21.7% of cycle time for expediting lots. Plenty of simulation results can evidence that the proposed strategy significantly outperforms mixed run mode.