Queue modeling of semiconductor test equipment using effective background process

Abstract

Improving overall equipment efficiency is very important in semiconductor manufacturing, necessitating high production costs. For this reason, many engineers are trying to increase the efficiency of semiconductor equipment. Most of the test equipment in backend processes has a single test processor to test memory devices, and test processors on equipment are typically used by the foreground user interface processes, which inherently have idle times between running times. In this paper, we offer a method to decrease idle time through using a background queue process, and to improve overall equipment efficiency for advanced test equipment. The feature of our modeling is that queue modeling through background processing is conducted automatically, not requiring instruction from users. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.