Toward on-demand wafer fab simulation using formal structure & behavior models

Contemporary factories in capital intensive industries such as semiconductor manufacturing are very complex, with many sources of risk. The highly competitive and global business environment forces companies to analyze, design, and continuously re-design factories with distributed multi-disciplinary teams. Traditional factory design approaches using spreadsheets and stand-alone simulations cannot adequately cope with the resulting time, cost, and risk requirements. In this paper, we address the opportunity to support fab design teams by providing on-demand simulation. The method for achieving this combines formal fab descriptive models with a process for generating fab analysis models from relatively standard sources of fab data.