Challenges and solution approaches for the online simulation of semiconductor wafer fabs

To make use of short-term simulation on an operational level, three aspects are essential. First, the simulation model needs to have a high level of detail to represent a small part of the wafer fab with sufficient precision. Second, the simulation model needs to be initialized very well with the current fab state. And third, the simulation results need to be available very fast, almost in real time. Unfortunately these conditions contradict each other. In particular, it takes a large amount of time to initialize a high precision full fab simulation model because of the huge amount of data. In this paper, we present the prototype of a fab driven simulation approach to overcome these time consuming limitations. We will show how it is possible to start a short-term simulation from the current fab state immediately, i.e., without further delay.