Practices of Wafer Fab Operations

Wafer fab has one of the most complex manufacturing activities in the modern industry. It involves highly sophisticated and fast changing technologies, extremely high capital spending, short product and technology lifecycle and ultra sensitivity to the yield and quality. A successful wafer fab operation requires not only know-how in technologies/ products, acute sense in management, basic understanding in business and in-depth knowledge of the operation theories. This book provides an overview of the requirements of running an efficient, cost effective and high quality wafer fab operation. It discusses almost all important aspects of operating an efficient operation based on the concept of operating curve management. It covers the important subjects such as: how the automation will help in the operation, how to measure the effectiveness of quality control system, how to manage the capital expenditure, the important elements of process and technology management, including yield enhancement from the prospective of quality, cost down and speed, what kind of KPI's to use to measure the performance in different operation areas in the fab. To lay a foundation for the discussion of the wafer fab operation, this book also presents the relationship between wafer size conversion and its financial impact to the profitability, the consequence of Moore's Law to the cost and eventually economic feasibility of the next generation wafer fabs. It shows that if the top-most economic trends and business guidelines are violated, no matter how efficient the operation is, the wafer fab cannot turn profit. For the readers who already have a lot experience in the wafer fab operation, there is much food for thought in this book.