Data Mining Analysis of Turn around Time Variation in a Semiconductor Manufacturing Line

Abstract

Variation reduction of Turn Around Time (TAT) in a manufacturing line is one of the important issues for line optimization. In a manufacturing line with many sequential process steps such as semiconductor fabrication, it is not easy to find the root causes of the TAT variation because (1) there might be a big time gap (more than 30 days) between cause and effect, and (2) there are so many machines (or tools) related with a process. The purpose of this paper is to propose a data mining based method to identify the root cause of TAT variation. We also aim to validate the performance of the proposed method through a simulation study.