A new release control policy (WRELM) for semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities

Release control plays an important role on the performance of a semiconductor wafer fabrication facility. Comparing to common release control strategies (such as FIFO, EDD, SA, CONWIP, WR, and WIPCTRL), a new workload regulating policy (abbreviated as WRELM), with a dynamic critical value on the bottleneck obtained by an extreme learning machine, is proposed. WRELM is validated and verified by a simulation model from a real 6 inch fab. The simulation results show that WRELM improves the throughput by 4.02% and decrease the mean cycle time by 15.40% comparing to those of common WR.