Welcome to Volume 25, Number 4 of the FabTime Cycle Time Management Newsletter. It was great seeing some of you at SEMICON West last week! Thanks to everyone who stopped by the INFICON booth. In this issue, we have announcements about a new SEMI Women in FOA forum, a webinar that I presented via the FOA about cycle time, and, most importantly, our upcoming in-person User Group Meeting. If you are a FabTime®, FPS, and/or FabGuard® customer, I urge you to pre-register now! We also have a heads-up that the archive of past newsletter issues on the old FabTime website will only be available for a short time. If you would like access to those issues, download them soon!
Our software tip of the month is about generating scrap charts in FabTime. We also have a subscriber discussion about using OEE in factories (front and back end) and another about metric trees for fabs. Our main article is about the impact of downtime on the fundamental drivers of cycle time and what that implies for metrics selection. Tracking the right equipment reliability metrics and using them as a basis for communication between fabs and equipment suppliers is a way to drive cycle time improvement.
Welcome to Volume 25, Number 3 of the FabTime Cycle Time Management Newsletter. In this issue we have announcements about an FOA Webinar that Jennifer will be presenting on cycle time and about the FabTime team’s first INFICON in-person User Group Meeting. There’s also a head’s up about an upcoming need to re-subscribe the newsletter, together with our usual highlights from industry news on LinkedIn. Our software tip of the month is about using FabTime to drill down into root causes, with a detailed example from our demo server.
There’s a plethora of subscriber discussion in this issue, about standby-WIP-waiting time, value stream mapping (which two different people brought up), software for predicting outs, WIP Turns rates, and test wafer ratios. In our main article, we revisit the topic of what makes an effective daily fab status meeting, ranging from general thoughts on meeting purpose and structure to specific ideas about content that should be included.
Welcome to Volume 25, Number 2 of the FabTime Cycle Time Management Newsletter. This is the first full newsletter issue since FabTime was acquired by INFICON (though I did send a Cycle Time Tip e-mail last month). Thanks for being here with us on this new stage in the FabTime journey. I’m happy to report that the FabTime team is doing well and has been made welcome by the team at INFICON.
This issue also includes an announcement about the upcoming Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference, as well as the usual highlights from my LinkedIn. Our software tip of the month is about creating a question for display in the FabTime charts menu from a chart. This month’s subscriber discussion forum has feedback from subscribers about box plots, standby-WIP-waiting time and test wafer ratios, as well as a question from me about cycle time challenges in assembly and test factories. I’m looking for input in the hope of writing about back-end factories in a future issue.
In our main article this month, we discuss the benefits of educating people on your team about the fundamentals of cycle time management. We share some history about how our cycle time class came to be, as well as an overview of the topics that we have chosen to include, and why. We close with some of our favorite things to teach, and a few success stories. We welcome your feedback.
Welcome to Volume 25, Number 1 of the FabTime Cycle Time Management Newsletter. We hope that your 2024 is off to a great start! In this issue, we have an announcement about the release of the new version of FabTime’s software to early adopter sites, as well as the usual highlights from Jennifer’s LinkedIn (Lots of wafer fab-related news has been circulating over the past couple of months). Our software tip of the month is about using the new version of FabTime to generate box plots (a long-time goal of Frank’s). In our subscriber discussion forum, we have detailed responses to last month’s main article about cycle time improvement for 300mm fabs and to a recent subscriber question about managing cycle time for external processes. We so appreciate these subscribers for taking time out of their busy schedules to contribute.
In the previous subscriber discussion forum, we introduced a new metric, requested by a prospective customer, for quantifying the impact of hot lots on regular lot cycle time. After we discussed this metric with our user group, it became clear that a more detailed explanation was needed. In our main article this month we have started with the example from the previous issue and expanded it into a more comprehensive discussion. We think this metric is important because it offers a way to show management the cost of ever-increasing quantities of hot lots in the fab.
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