Semiconductor fabrication facility design using a hybrid search methodology

The use of integrated circuits (ICs) is ever increasing in the past decade and will continue to increase in the foreseeable future. To compete successfully in global markets, semiconductor manufacturing facilities require good system performance in terms of high throughput and high yield on wafers with smaller line widths and larger diameters, while still maintaining low system costs. The installation of an automated material handling system (AMHS) within a typical bay layout configuration is a viable approach for improving system performance as well as reducing operating and capital investment costs. Integrated approaches for fab layout and AMHS design generally involve mixed integer programming (MIP) formulations that are difficult to solve for large size problems. This paper proposes a hybrid search methodology based on tabu search and simulated annealing to solve such layout and AMHS design integration problems in a wafer fab. The procedure was computationally tested for efficiency and effectiveness against an existing MIP formulation. The results indicate that the proposed procedure performs very well in terms of both solution quality and computation time. It is shown that this procedure is extendable to other layout and material handling system design problems.