INTEGRATED FACILITY LAYOUT AND MATERIAL HANDLING-SYSTEM DESIGN IN SEMICONDUCTOR FABRICATION FACILITIES

Semiconductor manufacturing is an important component of the U.S. manu facturing industry, Most of today's fabrication facilities and those b eing designed for the near future use a bay layout configuration and a n overhead monorail system for moving material between bays. These mat erial handling systems are usually designed with a spine or perimeter type of configuration, This paper investigates the layout and material handling system design integration problem in semiconductor fabricati on facilities and proposes a methodology for solving this integrated d esign problem, A spacefilling curve approach is used to address the fa cility layout, while the structure of the spine and perimeter configur ations are exploited to create a network how problem to determine the material handling system design, Computational results are presented a nd show exceptional promise for this procedure in solving the integrat ed design problem in a semiconductor manufacturing environment.