This research focuses on a scheduling problem in the semiconductor probing facility. Probing facility is composed of identical parallel machines and the parallel machines form three workstations for the tests with different recipes. Each machine can be set to three different tests and sequence-dependent setup times are required between operations due to temperature and probe card loading/unloading. Precedence relationship exists between three tests of each wafer lot. The scheduling problem for the probing facility is a parallel machine scheduling problem with precedence relationship and sequence dependent setup time. We develop heuristic algorithm to minimize makespan for the scheduling problem and numerical experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance.

We consider a wafer lot transfer/release planning problem from semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities to probing facilities with the objective of minimizing the deviation of workload and total tardiness of customers’ orders. Due to the complexity of the considered problem, we propose a two-level hierarchical production planning method for the lot transfer problem between two parallel facilities to obtain an executable production plan and schedule. In the higher level, the solution for the reduced mathematical model with Lagrangian relaxation method can be regarded as a coarse good lot transfer/release plan with daily time bucket, and discrete-event simulation is performed to obtain detailed lot processing schedules at the machines with a priority- rule-based scheduling method and the lot transfer/release plan is evaluated in the lower level. To evaluate the performance of the suggested planning method, we provide computational tests on the problems obtained from a set of real data and additional test scenarios in which the several levels of variations are added in the customers’ demands. Results of computational tests showed that the proposed lot transfer/planning architecture generates executable plans within acceptable computational time in the real factories and the total tardiness of orders can be reduced more effectively by using more sophisticated lot transfer methods, such as considering the due date and ready times of lots associated the same order with the mathematical formulation. The proposed method may be implemented for the problem of job assignment in back-end process such as the assignment of chips to be tested from assembly facilities to final test facilities. Also, the proposed method can be improved by considering the sequence dependent setup in the probing facilities.