Anyone who has ever invested money in the stock market has a sense of what it is like to aim for positive outcomes amidst stochastic circumstances with no guarantees. Semiconductor factories share many characteristics with financial markets: complicated to model, governed by difficult mathematics and plagued by stochastic disruptions. Nevertheless, successful manufacturers must meet their commitments, and doing so efficiently inevitably involves future state forecasting – whether for starts planning, scheduling, capacity modeling, etc. This talk will describe the types of questions that can be sensibly asked about semiconductor factory futures and the techniques that are used to answer them, with particular focus on high-ROI production-worthy applications. It will also speculate on where and how “AI” may help.
Speaker:
Dr. Holland M. Smith III
Director of Technical Marketing
Dr. Holland M. Smith III has been a practitioner of factory future forecasting for more than a decade, learning along the way from both published literature and the trenches. Prior to joining INFICON’s marketing team, Dr. Smith directed Smart Manufacturing systems architecture and installation projects at fabs across the world. Dr. Smith is a semiconductor data systems expert and a contributing developer of the INFICON FPS Digital Twin, which powers optimized Fab Scheduling among other industrial engineering-related applications. Dr. Smith has spoken widely across industry events (like Semicon West, FOA, SEMI Digital Twin Workshop, ASMC, etc.) on topics at the intersection of operations research, computer science and data science. Dr. Smith has a B.S, M.S. and Ph.D in Materials Science and Engineering from University of California, Berkeley, as well as a B.A. in Slavic Languages and Literature from Stanford University. He is based in Portland, Oregon.
Presentation Slides
Wondering what Fab Owners Alliance (FOA) is?
It’s one of the most valuable things you’ll find at SEMI (and free with your SEMI membership!)
The FOA Spare Parts Network alone could save you months of tool downtime for hard-to-find spares.
Getting your fab engineers involved in the various task forces will certainly help them.
The survey service is also invaluable, any time someone on your team thinks “I wonder how other fabs solve this problem…”
Contact Karim Somani (Sr. Program Manager, FOA) – [email protected]