Semiconductor fab maintenance challenge and BKM in downturn economy

The challenge of staying competitive in the current business environment towards opportunities requires creativity and new extreme thinking. Teamwork and taking risks are imperative to success. Our Novellus equipment maintenance team in the IBM Microelectronics Division Burlington is continually finding creative methodologies over and above the Best Known Methods (BKM) to drive towards better business decisions that translate directly into productivity improvements. Whereas Mean Time to Repair (MTR) could go up due to increased in-house solutions, every effort is driven towards maintaining the equipment availability at target. In this presentation, I will discuss the methodologies the maintenance team deployed to stay at productivity target and yet manage the cost of ownership at reduced spending. Primarily, I will show hardware and software examples that the team saw to be opportunities for improvement.