The Influence of Industrial Engineering in Semiconductor Fabrication Factory Optimization

To meet competitive market for the electronics consumer products, the integrated circuit is process at the semiconductor fabrication factory which is the most complex and challenging areas in manufacturing. This is due to semiconductor manufacturers will require to process 300 to 1000 steps depends on products, 60,000 WIP and 400 pieces equipment for typical 200mm wafer size technology. Due to this complexity, the product mixed is highly influence the capacity of the factory. Without careful planning, a product mixed will lead to lower output and resulted to lower revenues. This is very critical due the investment cost is of a factory can reach up to USD 4 billion. Most company would like to optimize the factory as much as possible to ensure fast profit return and to ensure operational sustainability. This paper will discuss how the Industrial Engineers (IE) plays the roles for capacity management to influence the factory output based on case study of semiconductor fabrication company, SilTerra Malaysia. The methodology use for data collection and data verification is from automated systems that integrated with the equipment with real time data transaction then summarized into E10 and OEE approach. This allow more analysis for better decision to decide product mix loading plan for factory sustainability and improvement up to 14.3% of the potential revenue. Keywords—Semiconductor fabrication, Industrial Engineering (IE), Work in Progress (WIP), Theory of Constraint (TOC), Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)