An efficient approach to cross-fab route planning for wafer manufacturing

This paper proposes an efficient approach to solve a cross-fab route planning problem for semiconductor wafer manufacturing. A semiconductor company usually adopts a dual-fab strategy. Two fab sites are built neighbor to each other to facilitate capacity-sharing. A product thus may be produced by a cross-fab route; that is, some operations of a product are manufactured in one fab and the other operations in the other fab. This leads to a cross-fab routing planning problem, which involves two decisions—determining the cut-off point of the cross-fab route and the route ratio for each product—in order to maximize the throughput subject a cycle time constraint. A prior study has proposed a method to solve the cross-fab route planning problem; yet it is computationally extensive in solving large scale cases. To alleviate this deficiency, we proposed three enhanced methods. Experiment results show that the best enhanced method could significantly reduce the computational efforts from about 13 h to 0.5 h, while obtaining a satisfactory solution.