A systematic approach for IC fab design

Facilities design is crucial to the performance of IC fabs. It is important to speed up the planning and design processes of IC fabs to react to the rapid changes of products, technologies, and equipment in IC manufacturing industry. This paper proposes a systematic three-phase approach to the design of IC fabs: initial design, rough-cut design, and detailed design. Each phase can be implemented on the basis of commercial packages. The importance of each phase is discussed, and the characteristics of several commercial packages are investigated.