Analysis of a borderless fab scenario in a distributed simulation testbed

Distributed simulation based on the High Level Architecture standard is adopted to realize the simulation of a borderless fab that involves two wafer fabs located in close proximity. The two fabs pool together their resources for capacity sharing. To demonstrate the benefits of this concept, experiments were conducted to measure the cycle time changes resulting from introduction of an additional product into either one of the fabs. In the case without cross fab material flow, the capacity of each fab alone is not sufficient to handle the increasing release rate of the new product as bottleneck machines surface. However, for the cross fab case where the front-end of the new product´s process is done in the first fab, while the back-end in the second, it is possible to avoid the bottleneck situation. As a result, the two fabs are able to increase their aggregated capacity without investing in new equipment.