Integration of scheduling and advanced process control in semiconductor manufacturing: review and outlook

Scheduling in semiconductor manufacturing is of vital importance due to the impact on production performance indicators such as equipment utilization, cycle time, and delivery times. With the increasing complexity of semiconductor manufacturing, ever-new products and demanding customers, scheduling plans for efficient production control become crucial. Scheduling and control are mutually dependent as control requires information from scheduling, for example, where jobs are processed, and scheduling requires control information, for example, on which equipment operations can be processed. Based on a survey of the literature, this article proposes a review and an outlook for the potential improvements by binding scheduling decisions and information coming from advanced process control systems in semiconductor manufacturing.