Design of virtual production lines in back-end semiconductor manufacturing systems

Due to the mammoth needs of the semiconductor market, semiconductor-manufacturing systems have been given a special attention. Their operations require a manufacturing execution system (MES) that functions as the representative of an enterprise resource planner on the shop floor. However, MES integration with a shop-floor control system, while guaranteeing the system agility, is a difficult implementation problem. This paper introduces the concept of virtual production lines (VPL) as a solution to this implementation. A methodology is proposed to facilitate the VPL design, which dynamically configures a large system into many production lines according to system status, guarantees the line balance and efficiency, and predicates the completion time of each group of products accurately. The proposed methodology and algorithms are demonstrated through a simplified back-end semiconductor manufacturing system.