High-®delity rapid prototyping of 300 mm fabs through discrete event system modeling $ Jonghun Park, Spyros A. Reveliotis * , Douglas A. Bodner, Chen Zhou, Jennfong Wu, Leon F. McGinnis School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 765 Ferst Dive., Atlanta, GA 30332, USA Abstract Traditionally, the semiconductor manufacturing industry has been driven by continuous technological advancement of the underlying production processes. Yet, as the industry matures, mere technology development is no longer suf®cient. The effective deployment and exploitation of the system production capacity and operational capability become critical for competitive success. Hence, currently, there is an increasing interest towards the development of a control paradigm/ framework that will allow the effective and ef®cient deployment and operation of contemporary fabs, including the upcoming 300 mm fab. The research program presented in this paper seeks to de®ne a detailed modeling and control framework for the real-time 300 mm fab operations, by exploiting and integrating emerging results in Discrete Event Systems theory. The proposed approach is demonstrated through a small-scale example, modeling the operation of a 300 mm fab bay. Furthermore, in addition to the development of the formal speci®cation, the presented program will also implement the proposed fab modeling and control framework in a Web-based simulation platform, that will function as a fab re-)con®guration and control synthesis tool for the fab control engineer, and as an educational tool for manufacturing system modeling and control. # 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: High-®delity modeling; The 300 mm fab; Flexible automation; Colored Petri nets; Rapid prototyping 1. Introduction Modern high-tech industry is characterized by a number of trends that affect the way in which man- ufacturers produce ®nished products. In today's envir- onment, manufacturers achieve competitive advantage by offering a variety of product types, a high level of product quality, and short order lead times i.e. the time from which an order is placed until the product is received). In addition, there is a constant pressure for innovative product design and customized products, which results in compressed product life cycles and the need for frequent facility recon®gura- tion to support the next generation of product. These trends contrast signi®cantly with the traditional para- digm of mass production, which places its emphasis on ef®cient production of high volumes of a standar- dized and relatively stable product type. The semiconductor industry is a prime example of such trends. Manufacturers produce a variety of semi- conductor-based products or integrated circuits e.g. memory chips or processors). At the same time, product quality is a critical consideration. Semicon- Computers in Industry 45 2001) 79±98 $ A preliminary version of this paper appeared in Park et al. [1]. * Corresponding author. Tel.: 1-404-894-6608; fax: 1-404-894-2301. E-mail address: spyros@isye.gatech.edu S.A. Reveliotis). 0166-3615/01/$ ± see front matter # 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII:S0166-361501)00082-3