Hidden equipment productivity opportunities in semiconductor fabrication operations

In this paper, we first show that true equipment utilizations may be significantly lower than what is recorded by existing monitoring systems in semiconductor fabrication operations, owing to various process and tool-related delays that occur during the tool "busy" or "running" state. We then demonstrate the use of a custom-developed system aimed at re-gaining the productivity loss, piloted at an Intel production facility for 300 mm 45 nm high volume manufacturing. Through a pilot case study, we present how these delays were reduced significantly (37% on average delay and 17-40% on variation in delay.) This improvement represents an equivalent of up to 4% improvement in true utilization on the pilot toolset, far more than any single project or even aggregation of projects on the roadmap for the toolset's availability improvement.