Scheduling began to be taken seriously in manufacturing industry at the beginning of 20th century with the work of Henry Gantt and other pioneers. Manufacturing industries have to meet shipping dates that have been committed to customers, as failure to do so may result in a significant loss of goodwill. Hence, they have to schedule the activities in such a way as to use the resources available in an efficient manner. Among various manufacturing industries, semiconductor manufacturing industry is an extensive and highly competitive industry mainly due to the fact that both price and product-life for new electronics products are decreasing exponentially over time along with rapid technological advancements. In such kind of industries, the capability of meeting due-date along with the reduction of cycle time is the most decisive factor of the fierce competition in the global market place. Hence, scheduling research remains among the most important tasks that must be performed routinely in SM industry.
Further, among various stages of SM, wafer fabrications are the most technologically complex process and challenging industrial environments in use today. The diffusion operation, carried out on batch processing machine, heavily impacts the production rate of wafer fabrication and in turn the SM industry. This is due to the fact that, diffusion operation requires relatively longest processing time among all the operations in the wafer fabrication. Hence, there is a rich amount of research studies available in scheduling of diffusion furnace (DF) since 1991 (i) to improve the due-date compliance, (ii) for significant reduction in the overall production time due to their longer processing time compared to other operations in the SM, and (iii) to effectively utilize the expensive resource. At the same time, the new researchers are struggle hard to get the relevant research studies. Therefore, it is essential to harness the available research studies.
Accordingly, this study presents a literature review, classification schemes and a simple meta-analysis for scheduling of DF research in SM industry. This review is based on a study of journals and web based documents/articles, which include conference materials, lecture notes in computer science, working papers, etc., which has been published between 1991 and 2019. Based on the detailed literature review carried out, this study grouped the existing literature based on (i) type of data, (ii) machine environment, (iii) nature of scheduling, (iv) objectives, and (v) methodology considered by the author. This study help the researchers (readers), who are interested in scheduling of DF by providing the source of reference, to identify the gap/untouched research problems and to understand the trend in scheduling of DF.