以模擬退火法減少TFT-LCD產品陣列段製程之測試項目之研究

Abstract

TFT-LCD (Thin-Film Transistor Liquid-Crystal Display，薄膜電晶體液晶顯示器)產業具有資本密集、技術密集、生產技術更新快等特性，因此如何縮短生產週期、維持一定的品質、加速研發新產品、且比競爭對手更早推出產品於市場均為提升企業競爭力的必要條件。在開發新產品過程中，為了測試新的製程條件，會增加許多測試項目。然而當TFT-LCD新產品進入量產階段且其製程水準趨向穩定之後，若檢驗和測試項目未減少，則過多的測試作業將使得無附加價值的檢測時間增加，進而拉長整體製造時間。本研究欲探討如何提升TFT-LCD於生產製造過程中測試之效率性，減少不必要的測試項目，建立精簡版檢測模型，使得此精簡版檢測模型之檢驗結果與完整測試項目檢驗出的結果能夠非常的接近。TFT-LCD 製造流程中，以陣列段的技術最複雜且生產週期最長，為TFT-LCD製造過程中的主要瓶頸，故本研究將著重於減少陣列段測試項目。本研究首先建立一個數學模型來說明欲求問題的目標式與所考慮的限制式，並蒐集臺灣某TFT-LCD公司陣列廠之測試資料，以實際資料建立檢測模型。由於所要處理的資料量龐大，本研究選擇以模擬退火法進行求解。實驗結果顯示，對於有76個測試項目的測試資料，本文所建立的最佳檢測模型在刪減了48個項目之後，可達檢測誤差僅為0.4511，而每一大片玻璃測試時間可減少7分鐘。整體而言，依本研究所提方法所建立之檢測模型可有效地減少測試項目，降低測試時間，並改善產品生產週期。

The TFT-LCD industry is capital-intensive, technology-intensive, and operates on raid technological lifecycles. To remain competitive, the industry needs to continue shortening production cycles without sacrificing quality and introduce highly competitive products with short time-to-market. During the product development stage, a large number of test items are needed to detect and overcome problems in unstable processes. However, as products are in mass production with more mature processes and the process quality tends to stability, if the number of test items is not decreased, too many testing jobs would increase non-value-added testing time, further elongating the whole production time. The objective of this research is to improve the efficiency of the testing jobs in TFT-LCD manufacturing process, reduce unnecessary test items, and establish a simplified inspection model that minimizes the number of test items without compromising the level of quality. In the manufacturing process of TFT-LCD, the TFT array process utilizes the most complex production technology and the longest cycle time, so it has been identified as the main bottleneck for the entire manufacturing process. Thus, this research focuses on reducing the number of test items for the TFT array process. In this research, a mathematical model with multiple objectives is formulated for the problem utilized to establish the simplified inspection model, and the test data of the TFT-LCD array process is collected from a leading TFT-LCD manufacturer in Taiwan. Because of the enormous amount of data to be processed, this research proposes a simulated annealing approach for the problem. According to the experiment results, the simplified inspection model eliminates 48 test items for the data with 76 test items, and the error of the testing results is only about 0.4511. On average, the testing time is reduced by 7 minutes for each TFT array glass substrate. In summary, the method proposed in this research proves to be effective in reducing test items, and also improve the testing time and production cycle time.