CONLOAD—a new lot release rule for semiconductor wafer fabs

Abstract

We present CONLOAD (CONstant LOAD), a new lot release rule for wafer fabs. It was developed to overcome some performance problems of traditional lot release rules such as CONWIP or Workload Regulation during product mix changes. We show that CONLOAD outperforms CONWIP and Workload Regulation with respect to keeping the bottleneck utilization at a desired level and to provide a smooth evolution of the WIP.