An efficient job-releasing strategy for semiconductor turnkey factory

The semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) industry in Taiwan plays a significant role in the world, and accounts for a major market share of packaging and testing. Past studies have discussed job-releasing models for upstream IC manufacturing industries, but only few have discussed from an IC turnkey perspective for IC testing and assembly processes. This article proposes a job-releasing strategy for an IC turnkey factory that achieves the following objectives under limited resources: (1) increasing the overall equipment efficiency of IC test equipments, (2) reducing IC fabrication cycle time and (3) increasing on-time delivery rate. To balance capacity utilisation between IC assembly and testing operations, this study uses a genetic algorithm with workload regulation heuristics to find a good job-releasing plan. The proposed strategy is implemented in an IC turnkey factory and is found to outperform the conventional strategy.