A Flexible Cluster Tool Simulation Framework with Wafer Batch Dispatching Time Recommendation

Hsin-Ping Yen1, Shiuan-Hau Huang1, Yan-Hsiu Liu2, Kuang-Hsien Tseng2, Ji-Fu Kung2, Yi-Ting Li1, Yung-Chih Chen3, Chun-Yao Wang4
1National Tsing Hua University, 2United Microelectronics Corporation, 3National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, 4Dept. CS, National Tsing Hua University


Abstract

The semiconductor manufacturing process consists of multiple steps and is usually time-consuming. Information like the turnaround time of a certain batch of wafers can be very useful for manufacturing engineers. A simulation model of manufacturing process can help predict the performance of manufacturing process efficiently, which is very beneficial to the manufacturing engineers. The simulation result can also deliver messages to system engineers for achieving better throughput after adjustment. In this work, we propose a flexible simulation framework for a cluster tool, which is the system for wafer processing. We implemented the simulator in C++ language with SystemC. The batch information used for the design of simulator was gathered from industrial data. The experimental results show that there is only less than 2% difference between the simulation and the manufacturing data in terms of entire processing time, which indicates the high accuracy of the simulator. The experimental results with the proposed dispatching method achieve a higher throughput compared to the manufacturing data such that the dispatching time points can be recommended to the system engineers.