Win-win approach between Tool productivity and delivery fulfillment by Carpool execution

In a rapid changing business environment, time to market is very critical for better service to our customers. Moreover, shorten the time to market and elevate the timing accuracy would be very helpful for risk management and resource reservation. It is important for semiconductor foundry to ensure the tool capacity is fully utilized with respect to expensive CAPEX. Therefore, proper dispatching for foundry fab production line management plays an important role to maintain a win-win situation between tool productivity and delivery fulfillment. Good priority follow rate leads to accurate delivery. The side effect is recipe changing will be too frequent. This paper demonstrates the Carpool concept to achieve the win-win between Tool productivity and delivery fulfillment in foundry environment. This concept was embedded in the real-time dispatching mechanisms to conduct the experiment. One demo tool efficiency was improved around 3%∼4% while the lost time kept almost the same. (Based on same utilization level, the delivery accuracy also kept > 95% during the period).