Optimizing class-constrained wafer-to-order allocation in semiconductor back-end production

Abstract This paper studies the problem of allocating semiconductor wafers to customer orders with the objective of minimizing the overallocation prior to assembly. It is an important problem for back-end semiconductor manufacturing as overallocation may have severe impact on operational performance due to excess inventory and unnecessarily occupied manufacturing equipment. In practice, a wafer can contain dies from several different die classes, making the wafer-allocation problem more challenging. As a novel contribution of this work, we explicitly consider the existence of multiple die classes on a wafer in the wafer-allocation problem. An integer linear programming formulation of the class-constrained wafer allocation problem is provided. The formulation is further extended to be more flexible by allowing the dies from different classes on the same wafer to be allocated to distinct customer orders. A real-world case study from the back-end assembly and test facility of a semiconductor manufacturer is presented. Experiments with real-world data show that the proposed method significantly reduces the overallocation performance in current practice and allows planners to quantify the value of flexibility in wafer allocation.