Using fractal dimensions as performance indicators for manufacturing systems

Chaos theory has been a young research field with successful applications to a variety of areas. Even though former publications have assessed the question if production systems behave chaotic, little work has been published on real life production systems, especially about semiconductor manufacturing. This paper applies the concept of fractal dimensions to assess the performance of production toolsets and demonstrates fractal dimension as an alternative for graphical analysis of performance indicators. Two examples illustrate the variety of applications and the capability of fractal dimensions to compare different zoom levels and to be tolerant against patterns in the data.