Scope

Semiconductor manufacturing is arguably the most complex of manufacturing environments. Reasons for this include tightly constrained production processes, reentrant process flows, expensive sophisticated equipment, variable demand, high levels of automation and an ocean of data. Yet, despite the difficulties, semiconductor manufacturing is a key industry in many industrialized nations and contributes substantially, both directly and indirectly (via business services, for example), to the global economy. With the emergence of highly automated wafer fabrication facilities (fabs), there is a compelling trend to extend the traditional automation scope to integrate with advanced decision technologies (such as Operations Research, Artificial Intelligence and Queuing Theory).