Efficient approach to cyclic scheduling of single-arm cluster tools with chamber cleaning operations and wafer residency time constraint

• Main Authors: Yang, Fajun, Wu, Naiqi, Gao, Kaizhou, Zhang, Chunjiang, Zhu, Yuting, Su, Rong, Qiao, Yan
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Cluster Tools; Wafer Manufacturing
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/88431; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/44649
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In semiconductor manufacturing, with the shrinking down of wafer circuit widths, a strict quality control is required for wafer fabrication processes, resulting in that after a wafer being processed and removed from a chamber, a cleaning operation that takes significant time is performed for eliminating the chemical residual. Such a cleaning operation makes a traditional backward strategy for single-arm cluster tools inefficient. By the existing studies, it is shown that the productivity can be improved if some numbers of chambers at a step are kept empty. With this idea, an extended backward strategy is proposed by deciding the optimal number of empty chambers. Based on such a strategy, this work studies the challenging problem for scheduling a single-arm cluster tool with both chamber cleaning operations and wafer residency time constraint for the first time. By building a timed Petri net model for the system, two linear programs are proposed to determine the minimal cycle time and test the existence of a feasible schedule and find it if existing. At last, two industrial examples are used to demonstrate the obtained results.