Efficient wafer sorting scheduling using a hybrid artificial immune system

Abstract

The efficiency of wafer sorting scheduling is of particular importance in semiconductor fabrication, especially in the face of strong industry competition. This paper presents a novel hybrid artificial immune system (HAIS) algorithm for solving the wafer sorting scheduling problem, aimed at minimizing the total setup time and the number of testers used. To evaluate the performance of the proposed HAIS algorithm and to compare it with existing approaches, computational experiments were conducted on 480 simulation instances generated from the characteristics of a real wafer probe centre. The experimental results revealed that the proposed HAIS algorithm is highly effective and efficient, as compared with state-of-the-art algorithms on the same benchmark.

Keywords:

• manufacturing scheduling
• wafer sorting
• artificial immune system
• meta-heuristic

Acknowledgements

This research was financially supported in part by the National Science Council of the Republic of China (Taiwan), under the Contract Nos. NSC 100-2221-E-027-040-MY2 and NSC 101-2410-H-182-004-MY2.