A high-fidelity, web-based simulator for 300 mm wafer fabs

Semiconductor fabs are capital intensive. The rate of capital return heavily depends on their productivity. Accordingly, simulation has been adopted in many cases as a viable design and analysis tool to achieve better productivity. However, the gap between the simplistic simulation models and real complex systems has limited the confidence to apply simulation results directly to real systems. Ideally, the simulator should support the rapid modeling and fast execution of high-fidelity fab models in order to be able to provide more realistic simulation results. In this paper, we present our current research effort to develop a high-fidelity web-based simulator for the 300 mm wafer fabs. We take a model-view-control approach that allows us to develop modular and reusable fab simulation objects. The proposed approach is implemented as a distributed system that uses a message-based event synchronization mechanism to coordinate the simulation objects as well as to support distributed simulation execution. The presented simulator also provides a high quality VRML animation for visualization of real time paced simulation execution.