Model to Determine the Economic Scale of Giga-Fab for Wafer Fabrication by Simulation

Semiconductor manufacturing is a capital-intensive and high-tech industry. In order to reduce production cycle time and increase production flexibility, the semiconductor manufacturers will expand the capacity in the existed fab and build up new fabs. However, the expandability of production capacity is not infinite since the huge fab scale will increase risk of production management. Therefore, it is necessary to find out the factors which will influence the performance of fab scale. This research uses the eM-plant simulation software to construct a simulation environment to conduct simulation experiment. The experimental environments were divided into two parts and named as high and low product mix complexity separately. Furthermore, three more factors were taken into accounts, which included stability of machine, variation of fab scale and releasing rate. By simulation, the analytical data is collected and analyzed its trend in these different environments. Simulation results reveal the significance of factors under different environments. Based on these results, the managers can conclude an appropriate fab scale in giga-fab, which will help to reduce the cycle time of products and increase the total throughput of giga-fab.