Scheduling Semiconductor Multihead Testers Using Metaheuristic Techniques Embedded with Lot-Specific and Configuration-Specific Information

In the semiconductor back-end manufacturing, the device test central processing unit (CPU) is most costly and is typically the bottleneck machine at the test plant. A multihead tester contains a CPU and several test heads, each of which can be connected to a handler that processes one lot of the same device. The residence time of a lot is closely related to the product mix on test heads, which increases the complexity of this problem. It is critical for the test scheduling problem to reduce CPU's idle time and to increase tester utilization. In this paper, a multihead tester scheduling problem is formulated as an identical parallel machine scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing makespan. A heuristic grouping method is developed to obtain a good initial solution in a short time. Three metaheuristic techniques, using lot-specific and configuration-specific information, are proposed to receive a near-optimum and are compared to traditional approaches. Computational experiments show that a tabu search with lot-specific information outperforms all other competing approaches.