半導體產業為台灣重點發展的產業。隨著技術的發展，成本考量、半導體晶圓尺寸及重量增加、搬運距離增加，物料搬運已非人力能負荷，必須仰賴自動化物料搬運系統。由於投入半導體廠自動化需要大量資金，其製程設備也非常昂貴，折舊速度快，因此如何降低機台閒置時間是重要的議題。
本論文使用限制理論及特性要因圖，找出生產機台閒置的關鍵，在於晶圓倉儲(Stocker)滿載，而目前的做法是在搬運軌道吊掛緩衝區(OHB, over hand buffer)做產品的預搬動作，然而此預搬的動作卻會造成搬運量增加。
故本論文提出機台緩衝區(EB, equipment buffer)，藉由機台緩衝區內部儲位來分擔晶圓倉儲負荷，藉由機台緩衝區改變傳送模式，減少因軌道緩衝區搬運量增加的問題。接著使用等候理論(Queuing theory)來驗證各緩衝區的傳送效益，以確保達到減少機台閒置時間並提高生產效率的目的。

Nowadays the semiconductor industry, being the focal industry in Taiwan, has to cope with the fast growing technology development, high cost consideration and increase in wafer sizes and weight, which have caused the long-distance material move flow in the factory. Hence, the over-loaded material handling must heavily rely on automated material handling system instead of by human as usual. Because the capital cost in process equipment investment is very high and also fast depreciation as well, therefore, the need of how to improve the production equipment lost time is an important issue in semiconductor industry.
In this thesis, by employing the theory of constraints and cause and effect diagram to identify the key is the stocker busy of production equipment idle. Currently solution in semiconductor factory to solve the problem is to conduct pre-move action on over-head-buffer (OHB), but this solution will increase the amount of handling.
We proposed equipment buffer (EB) process concept to solve the problem . The main process is to share the stocker loading by EB internal shelf, which changing the transfer mode to reducing the over-hand buffer (OHB) retransmission problem. The transfer efficiency of each buffer has been verified by queuing theory to guarantee that the proposed EB process concept has achieved the purpose of reducing the equipment lost time and improving the production capacity utilization..

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