Abstract
■ Semiconductor wafer fabrication plays a central role in electronics supply chain. Two characteristics of electronic products contribute to making the demand volatile: high variety and short life cycle. Semiconductor wafer manufacturers confront the challenges of reducing the lengthy cycle times as a means to deal with the highly variable demand in the supply chain. ■ Cycle time reduction thus becomes a critical issue for semiconductor wafer fabrication companies to attain competitive advantages. ■ Semiconductor manufacturing has long time been recognized as one of the most complicated manufacturing process owing to unrelated parallel machine environment, dynamic job arrival, general precedence constraint, and job re-circulation. These characteristics lead to longer mean and variance of cycle times. ■ In order to manage cycle time, we developed a framework considering the factors that can be used to control production line status such as WIP, availability, utilization, etc, and analyzed the impacts of these factors on the production cycle time. © 2011 TSIA.