New knowledge and tools are constantly expanding the range of applications for semiconductor devices, integrated circuits, and electronic packages. The solid-state computing, telecommunications, aerospace, automotive and consumer electronics industries all rely heavily on the quality of these methods and processes. In each of these industries, dramatic changes are underway. In addition to increased performance, next-generation computing is increasingly being performed by portable, hand-held computers. A. | May Gary S. Computational Intelligence in Microelectronics Manufacturing Computational Intelligence in Manufacturing Handbook Edited by Jun Wang et al Boca Raton CRC Press LLC 2001 13 Computational Intelligence in Microelectronics Manufacturing Introduction Gary S. May Georgia Institute of Technology The Role of Computational Intelligence Process Modeling Optimization Process Monitoring and Control Process Diagnosis Summary Introduction New knowledge and tools are constantly expanding the range of applications for semiconductor devices integrated circuits and electronic packages. The solid-state computing telecommunications aerospace automotive and consumer electronics industries all rely heavily on the quality of these methods and processes. In each of these industries dramatic changes are underway. In addition to increased performance next-generation computing is increasingly being performed by portable hand-held computers. A similar trend exists in telecommunications where the user will soon be employing high-performance multifunctional portable units. In the consumer industry multimedia products capable of voice image video text and other functions are also expected to be commonplace within the next decade. The common thread in each of these trends is low-cost electronics. This multi-billion-dollar electronics industry is fundamentally dependent on the manufacture of semiconductor integrated circuits ICs . However the fabrication of ICs is extremely expensive. In fact the last couple of decades have seen semiconductor manufacturing become so capital-intensive that only a few very large companies can participate. A typical state-of-the-art high-volume manufacturing facility today costs over a billion dollars Dax 1996 . As shown in Figure this represents a factor of over 1000 increase over the cost of a comparable facility 20 years ago. If this trend continues at its present rate facility costs will exceed the total .
