Practices of Wafer Fab Operations

Wafer fab has one of the most complex manufacturing activities in the modern industry. It involves highly sophisticated and fast changing technologies, extremely high capital spending, short product and technology lifecycle and ultra sensitivity to the yield and quality. A successful wafer fab operation requires not only know-how in technologies/ products, acute sense in management, basic understanding in business and in-depth knowledge of the operation theories. This book provides an overview of the requirements of running an efficient, cost effective and high quality wafer fab operation. It discusses almost all important aspects of operating an efficient operation based on the concept of operating curve management. It covers the important subjects such as: how the automation will help in the operation, how to measure the effectiveness of quality control system, how to manage the capital expenditure, the important elements of process and technology management, including yield enhancement from the prospective of quality, cost down and speed, what kind of KPI's to use to measure the performance in different operation areas in the fab. To lay a foundation for the discussion of the wafer fab operation, this book also presents the relationship between wafer size conversion and its financial impact to the profitability, the consequence of Moore's Law to the cost and eventually economic feasibility of the next generation wafer fabs. It shows that if the top-most economic trends and business guidelines are violated, no matter how efficient the operation is, the wafer fab cannot turn profit. For the readers who already have a lot experience in the wafer fab operation, there is much food for thought in this book.

晶圓廠是現代工業中最複雜的製造活動之一。它涉及高度複雜且快速變化的技術、極高的資本支出、產品和技術生命周期短暫以及對良率和品質的極度敏感性。成功的晶圓廠運營不僅需要技術和產品方面的專業知識，還需要對管理有敏銳的洞察力、對商業有基本的理解以及對運營理論有深入的了解。本書概述了運營高效、成本效益和高品質的晶圓廠所需的要求。它基於運營曲線管理的概念，討論了幾乎所有運營高效的重要方面。它涵蓋了自動化如何幫助運營、如何衡量品質控制系統的有效性、如何管理資本支出、包括從品質、成本和速度的角度提高良率的重要過程和技術管理要素，以及在晶圓廠不同運營領域中使用哪些關鍵績效指標來衡量績效。為了為晶圓廠運營的討論奠定基礎，本書還介紹了晶圓尺寸轉換與其對盈利能力的財務影響，以及摩爾定律對成本和下一代晶圓廠的經濟可行性的影響。它表明，如果違反了最頂層的經濟趨勢和業務準則，無論運營多麼高效，晶圓廠都無法獲利。對於已經在晶圓廠運營方面有豐富經驗的讀者來說，本書提供了很多值得思考的內容。