TY - GEN
T1 - Close-down process scheduling of wafer residence time-constrained multi-cluster tools
AU - Zhu, Qinghua
AU - Zhou, Mengchu
AU - Qiao, Yan
AU - Wu, Naiqi
N1 - Funding Information:
Q. H. Zhu is with the School of Computer Science and Technology, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou 510006, China(e-mail: zhuqh@gdut.edu.cn). This work was supported in part by the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province, China under Grant 2014A030310118 and Grant 2016A030313702, and in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61673123.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 IEEE.
PY - 2017/7/21
Y1 - 2017/7/21
N2 - Semiconductor manufacturing industry has adopted multi-cluster tools as wafer fabrication equipment that is extraordinarily pricey but highly attractive owing to their higher productivity than single cluster tools can achieve. A challenging issue is how to schedule these tools. It is especially difficult to schedule their frequently occurring close-down processes subject to wafer residency constraints. Such processes appear frequently as caused by wafer lot switches and preventive and emergency maintenances. They are dynamical and non-cyclic. We analyze the synchronization conditions for multiple robots to perform concurrent activities. Upon these conditions, for the situations that an optimal schedule can be found in the steady state, a linear program model is proposed to find a feasible and optimal schedule for close-down processes. An example shows the application and efficiency of our proposed method.
AB - Semiconductor manufacturing industry has adopted multi-cluster tools as wafer fabrication equipment that is extraordinarily pricey but highly attractive owing to their higher productivity than single cluster tools can achieve. A challenging issue is how to schedule these tools. It is especially difficult to schedule their frequently occurring close-down processes subject to wafer residency constraints. Such processes appear frequently as caused by wafer lot switches and preventive and emergency maintenances. They are dynamical and non-cyclic. We analyze the synchronization conditions for multiple robots to perform concurrent activities. Upon these conditions, for the situations that an optimal schedule can be found in the steady state, a linear program model is proposed to find a feasible and optimal schedule for close-down processes. An example shows the application and efficiency of our proposed method.
KW - Cluster tools
KW - robotic manufacturing cells
KW - semiconductor manufacturing automation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85027967981&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85027967981&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICRA.2017.7989068
DO - 10.1109/ICRA.2017.7989068
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85027967981
T3 - Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
SP - 543
EP - 548
BT - ICRA 2017 - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2017
Y2 - 29 May 2017 through 3 June 2017
ER -