Abstract
In the environment of 450mm wafers production known as the next-generation semiconductor production process, one of the most significant features is the full automation over the whole manufacturing processes involved. The full automation system for 450mm wafer production will minimize the human workers' involvement in the manufacturing process as much as possible. In addition, since the importance of an individual wafer processing increases noticeably, it is necessary to develop more robust scheduling systems in the whole manufacturing process than so ever. The scheduling systems for the next-generation semiconductor production processes also should be capable of monitoring individual wafers and collecting useful data on them in real time. Based on the information gathered from these processes, the system should finally have a real-time scheduling functions controlling whole the semiconductor manufacturing processes. In this study, preliminary investigations on the requirements and needed functions for constructing the real time scheduling system and transforming manufacturing environments for 300mm wafers to those of 400mm are conducted and through which the next generation semiconductor processes for efficient scheduling in a clustered production system architecture of the scheduler is proposed. Our scheduling architecture is composed of the modules for real-time scheduling, the clustered production type supporting, the optimal scheduling and so on. The specifications of modules to define the major required functions, capabilities, and the relationship between them are presented.
