Intel income pain not as deep as feared

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I guess I need to quote it for you...

"One thing about having one fab is that you must do development in the same fab you're doing production. That means adding new processes and materials right in the middle of everything. A factory will be brought to its knees without superb controls. Just to give you an idea of how massive this job is, last year AMD routinely ran 2.4M MES transactions per day; 120K dispatch queries per day, and 15K carrier moves per day. And these numbers are growing constantly. What's amazing is that the number of masks has grown by over 50% and the fab is still chunking out the same 20K WSM it was designed to do almost ten years ago. So there has been a huge productivity benefit extracted. These benefits are the key reasons why AMD chose to develop its own intelligent factory automation. It is a system that far exceeds that of anything commercially available."

This speaks to the flexibility of the system and its ability to handle high volumes of changes for different batches. BTW...they don't just have one fab any longer...Fab 36 is online now, on 300mm wafers.

"The IPS module (Integrated Production Scheduling) has real time dispatching of wafers and active scheduling. In the latest version, the scheduling will be predictive and agent based. Each lot will be its own agent that carries with it all the information needed to finish, including multiple levels of priorities. Agent Based Scheduling (ABS) is formed around scheduling agents and processing agents. These agents are independent entities that serve and look out for their owner in the system. The agents can represent lots, machines, PMs (Preventive Maintenance schedules), resources, etc. The power comes from collective behavior of these agents. So if sales or engineering have a hot lot ? even the ones that just have to go in today that didn't exist yesterday ? it can simply be entered in and the system dynamically makes all changes needed to schedules and tool loading."

There you go. No need to clear off the line, retool and then start new lots for a different product. This is way beyond what others, including Intel, have right now.

Posted by: techboy_z   Posted on: 07/20/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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