Multiobjective Scheduling of Dual-Blade Robotic Cells in Wafer Fabrication

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-1-2020

Abstract

As a kind of robotic cells, cluster tools are widely used for semiconductor wafer fabrication processes since they provide a reconfigurable and efficient environment. With recent advances in new semiconductor materials, the circuit line width has continuously being shrunk down, which brings new challenges for manufacturers. They require that a wafer should be moved away from a processing chamber as soon as possible after its processing is finished. To ensure high-quality integrated circuits in a wafer, its post-processing residency time must be minimized. It is also highly desirable to maximize the throughput of robotic cluster tools. This article aims at scheduling such tools with multiple objectives subject to wafer residency time constraints. To do so, new algorithms are proposed to calculate robot waiting time delicately upon the analysis of particular events of robot waiting for dual-blade robotic tools and optimally schedule such tools. The numerical results of industrial examples show that the proposed algorithms can provide an effective method to find schedules for dual-blade cluster tools such that multiple objectives are optimized.

Identifier

85089666096 (Scopus)

Publication Title

IEEE Transactions on Systems Man and Cybernetics Systems

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1109/TSMC.2019.2944866

e-ISSN

21682232

ISSN

21682216

First Page

5015

Last Page

5023

Issue

12

Volume

50

Grant

61603100

Fund Ref

National Natural Science Foundation of China

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