A state-of-art review and a simple meta-analysis on deterministic scheduling of diffusion furnaces in semiconductor manufacturing

Abstract

This paper provides a systematic review of research works on deterministic scheduling of diffusion furnaces (D-SDF) in the semiconductor manufacturing industry. After our screening process, we have identified 72 research articles published during the period 1992 to 2021 in various journals, conference proceedings, etc. This study proposes various classification schemes to systematically organise all the identified studies and to get micro-level details of D-SDF research. Further, various simple meta-analyses in the form of summary counts and percentages are carried out w.r.t (a) proposed classification schemes, and (b) various parameters such as data source, the maximum number of jobs in the instances, benchmark procedure considered, number of articles published, number of contributed authors over the years, top researchers in terms of number of publications, highly cited articles, publication outlets and publishers. From the detailed review analyses, this study suggests/shows future research opportunities/unexplored research problems considering problem configuration/objective(s)/solution methodologies in D-SDF research. Further, mapping of all references of 72 papers on D-SDF w.r.t. proposed classifications schemes would ease new researchers in D-SDF, in multiple perspectives. Finally, meta-analyses presented based on proposed classification schemes and various parameters, considered related to D-SDF problem, provide many important inferences to related researchers.

KEYWORDS:

• Diffusion furnaces
• semiconductor manufacturing industry
• deterministic scheduling
• classification schemes
• meta-analysis

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, [M Vimala Rani] on the request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

M. Vimala Rani

M. Vimala Rani is currently working as an Assistant Professor in Operations at the VGSoM, Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur. She obtained her PhD in Operations Management from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. She has received a Gold medal and the Best PhD thesis award by the Council of IISc. After her PhD, she has worked as ‘IISc Research Associate’ at the Department of Management Studies, IISc, Bangalore. She also worked as an Assistant Professor at the Amrita School of Business, Bangalore. Her research interest is on developing the mathematical model and heuristic algorithms for the problems related to industrial engineering and management.

Muthu Mathirajan

Muthu Mathirajan obtained his PhD in Operations Management and MS degree by research in Applied Operations Research (OR) from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. He also received his MSc in Mathematics from the Madurai Kamaraj University and Postgraduate Diploma in OR from the College of Engineering, Guindy. He has been working as a faculty of IISc Bangalore since 1986 and is serving as the Chief Research Scientist since 2013. His areas of interest include mathematical/heuristic optimisation and research methods for operations and supply chain management, sequencing and scheduling, personnel scheduling, routing and scheduling of logistics, urban road transport, and container terminal logistics problems.