A state-of-art review and a simple meta-analysis on deterministic scheduling of diffusion furnaces in semiconductor manufacturing

This paper provides a systematic review of research works on deterministic scheduling of diffusion furnaces (D-SDF) in the semiconductor manufacturing industry. After our screening process, we have identified 72 research articles published during the period 1992 to 2021 in various journals, conference proceedings, etc. This study proposes various classification schemes to systematically organise all the identified studies and to get micro-level details of D-SDF research. Further, various simple meta-analyses in the form of summary counts and percentages are carried out w.r.t (a) proposed classification schemes, and (b) various parameters such as data source, the maximum number of jobs in the instances, benchmark procedure considered, number of articles published, number of contributed authors over the years, top researchers in terms of number of publications, highly cited articles, publication outlets and publishers. From the detailed review analyses, this study suggests/shows future research opportunities/unexplored research problems considering problem configuration/objective(s)/solution methodologies in D-SDF research. Further, mapping of all references of 72 papers on D-SDF w.r.t. proposed classifications schemes would ease new researchers in D-SDF, in multiple perspectives. Finally, meta-analyses presented based on proposed classification schemes and various parameters, considered related to D-SDF problem, provide many important inferences to related researchers.