The long journey from standardization to fully fab automation and more

This paper describes our long journey from the first standardization projects to support a fully automated work flow to three complex automation hardware projects, including learnings about change management within a running fab for all departments. The general principles used to automate a mature fab were motivated by a clear economical approach – cost reduction in manufacturing by automation of simple and recurring logistic steps. This can only be successfully completed by an interdisciplinary team work. But there is no ONE recipe for all mature fabs – the older the fab, the more flexible and cost effective the automation concepts must be. Collaboration between human and machine become a key element in this context. One topic in this field is the development of smarter and cost efficient mobile robotic systems (AGV). Smarter means more intelligent, less cost and more stability in process execution. Since we manufacture IoT elements like Time of Flight and Radar sensor in our fabs – we also developed a new integrated sensor fusion concept combined with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine Learning (ML) methods.