Overall Wafer Effectiveness (OWE): A novel industry standard for wafer productivity

Abstract

Overall equipment efficiency (OEE) is an index that is widely used to measure equipment performance for semiconductor manufacturing. However, little research has been done to address productivity from the perspective of wafer exposure performance. This study aims to propose a novel standard, Overall Wafer Effectiveness (OWE), to evaluate the effectiveness of wafer exposure rather than only considering tool productivity. Furthermore, the proposed OWE can be easily extended to incorporate additional attributes such as throughput, yield, and price. In particular, a weighted OWE that integrates mask field utilization and OWE is illustrated with numerical example to show the practical viability of OWE as a semiconductor industry standard to drive collaborative efforts among IC designers, equipment vendors, and manufacturers for enhancing total wafer effectiveness.