Scheduling Analysis of Diffusion Area in Semiconductor Manufacturing.

This article focuses on the scheduling analysis of wafer lots in diffusion areas in semiconductor manufacturing. Diffusion is widely considered as a bottleneck due to its time-consuming nature and complex constraints. This work aims to properly arrange wafer lots that belong to different job families to machines and then form batches. There are multiple machine groups at the diffusion area, and each group consists of non-identical machines. To improve the productivity of the diffusion area, a designed genetic algorithm (DGA) is proposed. Further, the effectiveness and efficiency of DGA are validated by computational experiments. Comparison results show that the proposed method outperforms the loading balance rule of machines.