Dynamic load balancing among multiple fabrication lines

Abstract

We propose a load balancing method which balances all processing operations of products among multiple semiconductor wafer fabrication lines by using predictive scheduling results. From our simulation experiment we confirmed that the proposed method achieves a moderate load balancing feature among multiple fabrication lines each of which can independently fabricate wafers and has different wafer processing capacity. The load balancing feature effectively works to reduce waiting time at each process step and lead time of all products in multiple fabrication lines.