Touchless 300 mm fab production in the modern business environment

Fully automated, touchless fab production would not be possible without the new generation of factory control software designed to run factories without direct human intervention. These systems work especially well when running large volumes of fully qualified products on fully qualified tools. However, a great deal of planning and creativity is required to setup and maintain these systems to make them adaptable for new product/process qualification and ramp, new tool qualification, tool/process monitoring, sharing of production and development tools, and many other activities driven by shortening product life cycles and other aspects of the modern semiconductor industry. Responsibility for ensuring that the fab can be powerful, agile, and flexible lies across many internal organizations. But the responsibility lies most directly with the product integration/route build team and the factory systems integrators/lead users. The product integration/route build teams are responsible for defining all factory entities that will be controlled or need to be monitored for fab control. The factory systems integrators/lead users must then configure their systems run the fab within this environment fully defined by the product integration/route build teams. This article will explain how the fab "model" cannot be too simple or generic to allow the factory systems to properly monitor the fab and take appropriate and timely action for efficient production. Conversely the fab "model" cannot be so complex that defining product/process changes becomes so labor intensive and risk laden that it becomes the major cycle time contributor to new product/process introduction. These issues will be explained from the perspective of the dispatching system which uses a large spectrum of fab data to decide how the fab is run. The solutions that these teams use to solve the problems above have a direct effect on the ability of the fab to meet the needs of the business.