SysML-based Simulation Framework for Semiconductor Manufacturing

The speed of change, high complexity and risk in the semiconductor industry increases the importance of decision making in manufacturing. In particular, a growing need for faster and better decisions on factory design and operation demands more complexity and higher fidelity in factory simulation models. Two requirements to realize such models economically are: (1) reuse of existing simulation model information and (2) integrating a wide range of factory, product, and process information from numerous data sources to create specific instance simulation models. In this paper, we describe how a new systems modeling language, SysML, can support creating complex semiconductor factory simulation models that satisfy these two requirements. In particular, we show how to deal with very large complex instance models in terms of information integration across a range of information and engineering tools. As a demonstration, we show how the factory layout, or geometric model, created in a CAD package, can be integrated with a SysML instance model, created using a SysML modeling tool, to achieve bidirectional data exchange between the two, and thus provide key support to the simulation process.