Manufacturing WIP Management Systems with Automated Dispatching Decision: SilTerra Case Study

Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) wafer fabrication is a complex semiconductor manufacturing process. For a wafer manufacturing facility designed for 40,000 wafer starts per month, running 250 different devices with different number of processing steps, equipments, process recipes and many constraints. This results in variability in process time, equipment usage, queue time, operator respond time and others. A five percent improvement goal was set for manufacturing efficiency in the industrial engineering capacity model. This was based on competitor benchmark with less product types running simultaneously. This is needed for the company to stay competitive in this business. The results will be measured based on capacity utilization versus the target. This paper will discuss how to achieve an additional five percent factory utilization.