Ideal and potential flexibility measures for qualification management in semiconductor manufacturing

摘要

In semiconductor manufacturing facilities, workstations are defined as sets of non-identical machines that are able to process different product types. Depending on production volumes, the product-to-machine configuration and how products are allocated to machines, a specific workload balance on the toolset can be obtained. WIP and Time flexibility measures were proposed to determine how well the workload is distributed over the toolset compared to an ideal situation where all the machines have the same workload level. However, for many workstations, this ideal situation is not reachable due to configuration limitations. Hence, in this paper, we define complementary indicators, called potential flexibility measures. Computational experiments on industrial data show how these new indicators refine our understanding of qualification configuration. A robustness factor is also presented that can be used in all flexibility measures to improve the quality assessment of the workload balance.