A semiconductor company must bring technology to the market as soon as its application is deemed feasible to be a leader in the industry. The goal of this paper is to investigate production control methods in semiconductor R&D fabs to minimize the time to market for the aforementioned technology. Simulation models of a representative R&D fab are run with different levels of bottleneck utilization, lot priorities, primary and secondary dispatching strategies and due date tightness as treatment combinations in a formally designed experiment. The fab performance measures are percent on time delivery, average cycle time, standard deviation of cycle time and average work-in-process. Fab characteristics are found to influence the application of dispatching rules. However, several dispatching rules are found to be robust across performance measures.
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN SEMICONDUCTOR R&D FABSThe invention of the transistor in 1947 served to make semiconductors, the leaders of the electronics revolution (Busch 1999). An article on the top 100 R&D spenders in the IEEE Spectrum publication ranks International Business Machines Corp., U.S. and Intel Corp., U.S., major players in the semiconductors and semiconductor equipment sector, in the top 15 (Hira 2003). The semiconductor industry ranks behind only the automotive and communications industries in annual R&D spending. In 2001, the industry spent $14.2 billion on R&D (Wolfe 2002). The industry falls into the category of high technology because a high proportion of these R&D costs as a percentage of sales and also because a high number of the employees are scientists and engineers (Green 1996). Technology and product development are key to the success of semiconductor manufacturers. Thus, most of the industry leaders have both production fabs, where products are made for sale to the public, and research and development (R&D) fabs, where new technologies and products are designed and tested. Although production fabs and R&D fabs may have similar tool sets, semiconductor production fabs operate differently than R&D facilities. These differences arise from the scales of production, lot prioritization, material handling techniques and performance parameters. Production fabs aim at increasing throughput for maximizing profits whereas R&D fabs concentrate on developing new technology and minimizing time to market.Production fabs in general are characterized by a low product mix, high production volumes, established products with standardized routings and established processes. On the other hand, R&D fabs are characterized by large product mix with unique and/or non-standard routes, prioritization of research activities, random engineering holds and mandatory testing procedures.While a significant body of research exists for designing, analyzing and improving the performance of production fabs, very little has been done to study the performance of R&D fabs. In general, this paper involves conducting simulation experiments on models of R&D fabs to determine factors that sig...
