Tool procurement planning for wafer fabrication facilities: a scenario-based approach

The rate of change in technology in the semiconductor industry has made the demand supply planning process extremely challenging for manufacturers. Th is problem is further exacerbated for tool procurement because the tools ar e made to order, very expensive and have a long lead time for delivery. In this paper, we present a scenario-based stochastic planning approach for to ol procurement under uncertainty in demand and formulate the problem as a m ixed integer program. Our results based on the data from a manufacturing li ne indicate that the heuristics for stochastic planning can significantly o utperform deterministic planning.