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INDUSTRY FEATURE
ILOG Fab PowerOps
Breakthrough for fabs
For semiconductor fabrication plants, or “fabs,” innovation is a daily concern. To remain competitive and profitable, these enormously expensive factories must respond quickly to dynamic business events, while simultaneously reducing cycle time and increasing tool utilization.
Scheduling fab production is uniquely challenging, however, because of the complex process flows and product mix, and often unpredictable events that interrupt planned operations. Most existing manufacturing solutions lack the domain knowledge of semiconductor tools and production processes to efficiently and reactively operate fabs. These factories are also far too complicated to be optimally scheduled with logical rules and lot priority mechanisms alone.
ILOG’s answer
ILOG has created a new application -- ILOG Fab PowerOps (FPO) -- to address the constraints unique to fab production. ILOG FPO produces and updates optimal forward-looking production schedules in real time for all the tools in each fab process area.
ILOG FPO is a detailed production scheduling application. Integrated with existing factory systems, it generates optimal production schedules and monitors production performance. It accomplishes these activities through three areas of functionality:
- Scheduling Engines – Dedicated software engines for the primary fab process areas, including diffusion, photolithography, thin films, etch, chemical mechanical polishing and implant
- Analyzer – Graphical user interface for displaying and comparing schedules and performance metrics in charts and graphs, and tuning scheduling engine parameters
- Backbone – Functionality for connecting ILOG FPO’s modules to data sources, filtering and transferring data, storing custom data and parameters, archiving schedules, and publishing schedules to GUIs, equipment interfaces and dispatching systems
ILOG FPO delivers unprecedented savings to the world’s most sophisticated fabs. Learn more at http://fpo.ilog.com.
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