Analysis of production control methods for semiconductor research and development fabs using simulation

A semiconductor company must bring technology to the market as soon as its application is deemed feasible to be a leader in the industry. The goal of this paper is to investigate production control methods in semiconductor R&D fabs to minimize the time to market for the aforementioned technology. Simulation models of a representative R&D fab are run with different levels of bottleneck utilization, lot priorities, primary and secondary dispatching strategies and due date tightness as treatment combinations in a formally designed experiment. The fab performance measures are percent on time delivery, average cycle time, standard deviation of cycle time and average work-in-process. Fab characteristics are found to influence the application of dispatching rules. However, several dispatching rules are found to be robust across performance measures