Advanced secondary resource control in semiconductor lithography areas: From theory to practice

Semiconductor frontend fabs are very complex manufacturing systems. Typically, the bottleneck of such a fab is the photolithography area because of its highly expensive equipment and the huge number of required secondary resources - the so called reticles. A reticle (mask) is needed to structure different layers of integrated circuits on the wafers. The reticles can be moved between the equipment with regard to several constraints. This paper examines the benefits of a solver-based reticle allocation in comparison to a classical rule-based heuristic. In a first part, several simulation experiments are performed on the basis of representative test data. The second part presents results from real world application. Thereby it is shown, that the new approach shows significant improvements of different key performance indicators (KPIs).