Evaluating capacity pooling strategy in semiconductor manufacturing: a productivity perspective study

Abstract

Recently, increasing attention has been focusing on the concept of the borderless fab, which expands capacity through a manufacturing strategy rather than capital investments. In a borderless fab, the capacity of several wafer fabs is pooled, and partially completed wafers are allowed to move from one fab to another. This paper proposes a model to evaluate the potential benefits of adopting capacity pooling from the macro-viewpoint. We demonstrate our model using actual full-scale fab-level operational data, and the result reveals that capacity pooling can improve monthly capacity by 3% on average.