Scheduling of dual-arm cluster tools with wafer revisiting and residency time constraints

Abstract

In its fabrication, a wafer must meet its residency time constraints, i.e., it must leave its process chamber within a certain time after its process is done. It may need to visit some processing steps for a number of times, called wafer revisiting. For the typical wafer revisiting process of atomic layer deposition (ALD), this paper studies the scheduling problem of dual-arm cluster tools with both residency time constraints and wafer revisiting. To do so, a Petri net model is developed for the system. Then, with the Petri net model and based on a one-wafer cyclic scheduling method previously developed by the authors of this paper, schedulability conditions and scheduling algorithms are derived. The schedulability can be checked by analytical expressions. If schedulable, an optimal one-wafer cyclic schedule can be found by simple calculation. Thus, the proposed approach is very efficient. In addition, with the Petri net model, a simple way is presented to implement the obtained schedule. Illustrative examples are given to show the application of the proposed approach. © 2005-2012 IEEE.