A short-term capacity trading method for semiconductor fabs with partnership

Abstract

This paper presents a capacity trading method for two semiconductor fabs that have established a capacity-sharing partnership. A fab that is predicted to have insufficient capacity at some workstations in a short-term period (e.g. one week) could purchase tool capacity from its partner fab. The population of such a capacity-trading portfolio may be quite huge. The proposed method involves three modules. We first use discrete-event simulation to identify the trading population. Secondly, some randomly sampled trading portfolios with their performance measured by simulation are used to develop a neural network, which can efficiently evaluate the performance of a trading portfolio. Thirdly, a genetic algorithm (GA) embedded with the developed neural network is used to find a near-optimal trading portfolio from the huge trading population. Experiment results indicate that the proposed trading method outperforms two other bench-marked methods in terms of number of completed operations, number of wafer outs, and mean cycle time. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.