A Smart Sampling Scheduling and Skipping Simulator and its evaluation on real data sets

As modern manufacturing technology progresses, measurement tools become scarce resources since more and longer control operations are required. It thus becomes critical to decide whether a lot should be measured or not in order to get as much information as possible on production tools or processes, and to avoid ineffective measurements. To minimize risks and optimize measurement capacity, a smart sampling algorithm has been proposed to efficiently select and schedule production lots on metrology tools. This algorithm and others have been embedded in a simulator called “Smart Sampling Scheduling and Skipping Simulator” (S5). The characteristics of the simulator will be presented. Simulations performed on several sets of instances from three different semiconductor manufacturing facilities (or fabs) will be presented and discussed. The results show that, by using smart sampling, it is possible to drastically improve various factory performance indicators when compared to current fab sampling.