MengChu ZHOU
Chairman, IKAS Industrial Automation

Biography

Prof. MengChu Zhou is the Chairman of IKAS Industrial Automation, and has over 20 years extensive research and application experience in semiconductor smart manufacturing. He joined New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Newark, NJ in 1990, and is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests are in Petri nets, Internet of Things, big data, web services, manufacturing, transportation, and energy systems.

Prof. Zhou has over 800 publications including 12 books, more than 460 journal papers (360+ in IEEE Transactions), and 28 book-chapters. He has more 11 patents. He has been among most highly cited scholars for years and ranked top one in the field of engineering worldwide in 2012 by Web of Science/Thomson Reuters. His Google citation count is well over 28, 000 and H-index is 82.

He is the founding Editor of IEEE Press Book Series on Systems Science and Engineering. He is a recipient of Humboldt Research Award for US Senior Scientists, Franklin V. Taylor Memorial Award and the Norbert Wiener Award from IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society. He is a life member of Chinese Association for Science and Technology-USA and served as its President in 1999. He is a Fellow of IEEE, International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, Changjiang (Yangtze River) Scholar, and “1000 Talents Global Expert Program” Scholar (Qian Ren Ji Hua).

Abstract

Improving Semiconductor Manufacturing through Smart Planning, Dispatching and Control

Built on advanced resource-oriented petri nets (ROPN), big data, and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, IKAS Semiconductor Smart Manufacturing Solutions Suite (aka, IKAS Suite) is dedicated to address the ever more challenging manufacturing environment with more diverse demands, limited capacities, shorter order lead-time, and more complex process technologies.

The highly efficient and responsive IKAS production models perform real-time monitoring and optimization of the various aspects of semiconductor manufacturing processes, from high level strategic resource and capacity planning down to real time equipment and station level smart dispatch and control, helping manufacturers shorten production and R&D cycle time, increase capacity, reduce cost, and improve yield. By using IKAS smart dispatch system, the capacity of the bottleneck station from an actual semiconductor production line can be improved by ~8%, while the cycle time of the station can be reduced by 9%, significantly improving the manufacturing efficiency.