Factory Physics and Automation blog

I recently run into a very nice article written by Jeff Winter – discussing the evolution of maintenance approaches. I thought it is absolutely worth sharing here. Thank you Jeff for giving me permission to do so. More interesting articles by Jeff can be found here:https://www.jeffwinterinsights.com/ Please see the article here: MaintenanceDownload

In the last 3 months there was a working group under the umbrella of SEMI working on a Maturity Framework – and the 1st results were presented at the SemiCon West last week in Phoenix, AZ. I had the opportunity to contribute to this work. The attempt is to give existing 200mm Wafer FABs an…… Continue reading Legacy FAB Automation Maturity Framework

I like to thank everybody who participated in the survey in the recent weeks. The survey had 5 different focus areas:- 100/150mm Frontend FABs- 200mm Frontend FABs- 300mm Frontend Fabs – Assembly/Test/Backend- non semiconductor hight tech FABs Unfortunately, only the 200mm Frontend section got enough participation to assume that the results are statistically relevant. Not…… Continue reading Results of FAB Automation 2025 survey

In a recent discussion with my colleague Wesley Capar – talking about FAB automation and what the overall situation in the current difficult business environment might be – we came up with the idea to ask YOU – the industry experts on your opinion. Since the situation is likely very different between state of the…… Continue reading State of Semiconductor FAB automation in 2025

This post will be all about the advantages and capabilities of RFID based carrier tracking. But before I dive into this – here are the results from the poll from part 1: Based on this more than half of the legacy FABs have no complete location tracking of all carries in place. In my opinion…… Continue reading Importance of carrier location tracking – part 2

To make it short: We had a blast ! The 22nd edition of the conference took place in Dresden, Germany last week and I had the honor to play an active part. Together with a few of my colleagues from Fabmatics Germany we hosted the break out session Test Wafers – the hidden GEMS in…… Continue reading Innovation Forum for Automation 2025

Another super busy year went by like a breeze – and I like to wish all my readers a great Holiday Season and a good start into 2025. Speaking of 2025 – there will be 2 great conferences early next year which I plan to attend and I like to raise your interest. Innovation Forum…… Continue reading Good Bye 2024 – Hello 2025 !

When looking on the topic of improving Wafer FAB performance – the topic of lot and/or carrier tracking is often not in focus. For fully automated 300mm FABs this is really not an issue, because it is fully covered using RFID tags/pills on the FOUP and have any possible place where a FOUP can “sit”…… Continue reading Importance of carrier location tracking – part 1

In the last few weeks I had the opportunity to visit a few of our (FABMATICS) customer FAB’s here in the US – sure enough the topic of test wafers and the options and benefits to automate test wafer handling came up in all of them. They all categorized themselves into the area of higher…… Continue reading Test Wafer, part 3

First of all, thanks to everybody who participated in the test wafer usage poll in the last post. I received some decent feedback and below are the results: For 150 and 200mm FABs (based on 15 data entries) The data show that test wafers play a massive role in the day to day FAB business.…… Continue reading Test Wafer, part 2

Inspired by the recent LinkedIn post from Fabmatics about the TestWaferCenter (LINK) I thought it is time to look a bit closer at the general topic of “test wafers”. So what are test wafers ? To keep it simple I will use the term “test wafer” for any non-product wafer in a FAB. Test wafers…… Continue reading Test Wafer , part 1

Amazing how fast another year went by. I want to use the opportunity to say THANK YOU to all the followers and readers of my block. 2023 was again a very dynamic and successful year. Lots of good interaction on the subject of Factory Physics and Automation. I wish you a great Holiday Season and…… Continue reading THANK YOU 2023

Today I save a lot of time typing – since there is a great article on the topic – written by McKinsey and Company. As I have written about this topic in earlier posts – I can only recommend to read this piece as well: On a related topic, a good old friend and former…… Continue reading Maintenance and FAB productivity

What an event it was ! Critical Manufacturing organized on outstanding event – and I hope there will be a second one not too far in the future. About 500 experts met in Porto to discuss digitization and Industry 4.0 efforts. To me it was mind-blowing how much is going on in this area. A…… Continue reading MES & Industry 4.0 Summit in Porto, Portugal

Next years Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference (ASMC) will take place in a new location. After many years in Saratoga Springs, NY ASMC 2024 will take place in Albany, NY. Every year over 400 experts from the semiconductor industry meet at the conference to discuss and exchange about manufacturing challenges. Due date for this years call…… Continue reading ASMC 2024 – call for papers

I’m usually writing here about Factory Physics and (soon) Factory Automation topics. One major aspect of both is to have good data to understand the behavior of your FAB. Modern FABs are extremely complex “eco systems” and operating at “best performance” possible needs fast access to the “right” data. Key for this is for sure…… Continue reading MES Summit in Porto, Portugal

Today just a quick heads up: next years Innovation Forum for Automation will take place in Dresden, Germany on January 25 -25. This year, there is a call for papers, so if you have an interesting project, problem or problem solution in the area of factory automation – the Innovation Forum could be a great…… Continue reading 2024 Innovation Forum for Automation

I just came back from the 2023 ASMC in Saratoga Springs, which was packed with 15 technical sessions and lots of great presentations. One topic was in the air throughout all the sessions – will the semiconductor industry have enough skilled operators, technicians and engineers ? Almost all keynotes brought this point up and there…… Continue reading Data is the new oil – or is it skilled workforce ?

To illustrate which uptime pattern from the last post might be more favorable I will add some tool utilization to the same 3 charts: the combined charts for the 3 scenarios are these: This example assumes that the productive usage every single day is a flat 80% of the total time, which is a very…… Continue reading Equipment Uptime and FAB speed, part 2

It has been a while, but summer in upstate NY is too beautiful to not enjoy it as much as possible. Downside is (at least for the blog) – I spend less time on the computer to write new posts. So instead posting about Factory Physics and Automation topics, I do more of this: Kayaking…… Continue reading Summertime (Blog) Blues

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Last week I had the honor to present a keynote at the 19th Innovation Forum for Automation in Dresden, Germany. After 2 years of virtual conferences, this year it was a full in person event again. Here are the slides of my talk: 19th_innovation_forum_automation_talk_tbeeg_extDownload update: here are the video recordings of both days ( these…… Continue reading 19th Innovation Forum for Automation

Today only a super short post. If you have ever wondered, how many Semiconductor Wafer FABs are there – here is a great article on that topic from Daniel Nenni on SemiWiki: LINK

I did not discuss the results of the last poll yet. This post will focus on that. Unfortunately, not a lot of readers did participate. The data is statistically more on the weak side, but I think the outcome is in line with what I was expecting: It seems that 70% of the voters use…… Continue reading Fab cycle time and capacity planning

I recently attended the Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference (ASMC) in Saratoga Springs, NY and listened to a very interesting presentation. Bill Wiseman from McKinsey & Company spoke about the future of the US semiconductor ecosystem and a few fundamental challenges which will have significant impact. Bill is a longterm insider of the semiconductor business and…… Continue reading US Semiconductor Ecosystem Outlook

Happy Easter everybody ! Today only a very short post – since I’m discussing here normally how semiconductor FABs work in terms of cycle time and output, I thought why not have a quick look inside a FAB ? This post was triggered by a recent YouTube post of an Intel FAB walk, which nicely…… Continue reading View into a FAB

In one of the earlier blog posts (LINK) I received interesting feedback on what are “acceptable” FAB cycle times. The results showed big differences and I think this is mainly based on voters professional experience. There are a lot of factors which influence a factories capability to achieve a certain cycle time. If we assume…… Continue reading Wafer FAB – size does matter !

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Reflecting on the wide spread of acceptable wait times and therefore acceptable FAB cycle times from the poll results, I was wondering: Why do people have these different opinions. I think it has to do with the actual factory conditions, the individual voters have experienced in their professional careers. To have fast cycle times is…… Continue reading Chip shortage and FAB performance, part 2

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here is the full bottleneck series as downloadable PDF file: post_bottlenecksDownload

Happy New Year ! This will be the last part of the Bottleneck discussion. As mentioned in part 3 – I think the most objective and telling indicator to see what is the true factory bottleneck is: highest average lot wait time at a tool group Wait time or cycle time in general is one…… Continue reading Bottlenecks, final part

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