A Review of Scheduling Research for Reentrant Process Segments with Special Constraints in Semiconductor FABs

Jongmin Lee

doi:10.55524/ijirem.2025.12.6.20

Abstract

Reentrant flow shops differ fundamentally from traditional linear production lines in which each job or lot visits a machine only once. In a reentrant structure, identical equipment must be revisited multiple times before the manufacturing process is completed, thereby breaking the assumption of a strictly unidirectional production flow. As a result, job precedence relationships become increasingly complex and the load on bottleneck tools grows in a nonlinear manner. In semiconductor fabrication, additional practical constraints—such as recipe changeover minimization in photolithography and batch processing requirements in wet cleaning—further amplify the difficulty of scheduling. These factors lead to the dispersion of waiting times, accumulation of work-in-process (WIP), and a decline in equipment utilization, ultimately lengthening overall production lead time. Such effects are particularly pronounced in high-tech manufacturing industries, including semiconductors, displays, and printed circuit boards, where a single product typically passes through hundreds of processing steps and repeatedly returns to specific stages. This study conducts an in-depth review of five representative research works that focus on scheduling in process segments with reentrant structures and special operational constraints in semiconductor FABs. From an integrated perspective, the paper analyzes how these studies define their scheduling problems, design algorithms and mathematical models to capture structural complexity, and what implications their results offer in terms of both theoretical advancement and practical performance improvement.

Keywords

Cleaning, Photolithography, Reentrant, Scheduling, Semiconductor

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Cites this article as

J. Lee "A Review of Scheduling Research for Reentrant Process Segments with Special Constraints in Semiconductor FABs", International Journal of Innovative Research in Engineering and Management (IJIREM), Vol-12, Issue-6, Page No-111-115, 2025. Available from: https://doi.org/10.55524/ijirem.2025.12.6.20

Corresponding Author

Lee Jong-Min

Ph.D Candidate, E-Business, Kyonggi University, Suwon, South Korea

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