The cycle time of a wafer lot refers to the time that the wafer lot has experienced from its input to output. Predicting the cycle time of each wafer lot is a crucial task for a wafer fabrication factory (wafer fab), but existing prediction methods cannot achieve 100% accuracy. Therefore, if the...

Experts often have unequal authority levels in organizations. However, this has rarely been considered reasonably in solving problems in the manufacturing system. In addition, a fuzzy collaborative estimation method can be more flexible and effective if experts have unequal authority levels. We...

There is a localization wave in the semiconductor industry for pushing wafer foundries to transfer their production capacity to where chip designers are located. The main reasons for the localization of semiconductor supply chains include the US-China trade war, geopolitics, COVID-19, the...

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been applied to predict the cycle times of jobs in manufacturing accurately. However, the prediction mechanism of a DNN is complex and difficult to communicate. This limits its acceptability (or practicability) in real-world applications. An explainable...

Methods based on artificial neural network (ANN) or deep neural network (DNN) applications have been proposed to predict job cycle time effectively. However, the predicting mechanism of ANNs (or DNNs) is often difficult to understand and communicate. This problem has hindered their acceptability...

Cycle time management plays an important role in improving the performance of a wafer fabrication factory. It starts from the estimation of the cycle time of each job in the wafer fabrication factory. Although this topic has been widely investigated, several issues still need to be addressed,...

Cloud manufacturing (CMfg) is a new-generation service-oriented networked manufacturing model that provides distributed users centralized managed manufacturing resources, ability, and services. CMfg is applied here to a semiconductor manufacturing factory. Benefits are classified into five...

Cycle time reduction plays an important role in improving the competitiveness and sustainability of a semiconductor manufacturer. However, in the past, cycle time reduction was usually unplanned owing to the lack of a systematic and quantitative procedure. To tackle this problem, a systematic...

A location-aware service (LAS) is an imperative topic in ambient intelligence; an LAS recommends suitable utilities to a user based on the user’s location and context. However, current LASs have several problems, and most of these services do not last. This study proposes an optimization-based...