Development of Smart Semiconductor Manufacturing: Operations Research and Data Science Perspectives

With advances in information and telecommunication technologies and data-enabled decision making, smart manufacturing can be an essential component of sustainable development. In the era of the smart world, semiconductor industry is one of the few global industries that are in a growth mode to smartness, due to worldwide demand. The important opportunities that can boost the cost reduction of productivity and improve quality in wafer fabrication are based on the simulations of actual environment in Cyber-Physical Space and integrate them with decentralized decision-making systems. However, this integration faced the industry with novel unique challenges. The stream of the data from sensors, robots, and Cyber-Physical Space can aid to make the manufacturing smart. Therefore, it would be an increased need for modeling, optimization, and simulation for the value delivery from manufacturing data. This paper aims to review the success story of smart manufacturing in semiconductor industry with the focus on data-enabled decision making and optimization applications based on operations research and data science perspective. In addition, we will discuss future research directions and new challenges for this industry.