A Solution for Dedicated Machine Constraint in Semiconductor Manufacturing

We propose a heuristic load balancing (LB) scheduling approach based on a resource schedule and execution matrix (RSEM) to tackle the dedicated machine constraint for the photolithography process in semiconductor manufacturing. The constraint of having a dedicated machine is one of the new challenges introduced in photolithography machinery due to natural bias. With this dedicated machine constraint, if we randomly schedule the wafer lots to arbitrary photolithography machines at the first photolithography stage, then the load of all photolithography machines might become unbalanced. However, many scheduling policies or modeling methods proposed by previous research for the semiconductor manufacturing production have not discussed this dedicated machine constraint. In this paper, along with providing the LB approach to the issue of the dedicated machine constraint, we also present a novel model-the representation and manipulation methods for the task patterns. The advantage of LB is to easily schedule the wafer lots by simple calculation on a two-dimensional matrix. We present the result of the simulations to validate our approach as well.