Manufacturing efficiency improvement through automation of test wafer procedures

One of the critical challenges facing semiconductor manufacturing in today's competitive market is the need to drive profitability by increasing efficiency without increasing headcount. A traditionally manpower-intensive area of manufacturing is tool qualification test wafer management. A study is presented using a seven-step focused-improvement methodology to develop and implement Computer-Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) tools to reduce manual intervention in test wafer management for labor and error minimization.