Mr. Anuj MAHENDRU
Global Director of Semiconductor and Hi-Tech Industry Rockwell Automation, United States
Anuj Mahendru has more than 29 years of diverse experience working for some of the world’s largest companies focused on Controls & Automation in Manufacturing. For the past 8 years he has been engaged with the semiconductor ecosystem and currently serves as the Global Director of Semiconductor and Hi-Tech Industry at Rockwell Automation –World’s largest company focused on Industrial Automation and Digital Transformation. He leads global cross functional strategic teams with a strong focus on industry challenges and a goal to deliver positive business outcomes for his customers leveraging the latest disruptive technologies. His passion to contribute to the success of this industry is representative through his engagement with the SEMI organization over the past five years. As a co-chair and key member of SEMI’s various initiatives, including the Fab Owners Alliance, he continues to further their Global SMART manufacturing, workforce and sustainability initiatives via thought leadership, application knowledge and ecosystem insights.
Anuj has made significant contributions to Rockwell Diversity and Inclusions journey and is the recipient of the Global Impact award, has led D&I teams, Employee resource groups, held offices and serve on the board of various nonprofit organizations in the community and University relations.
Presentation Title:
Cleanroom Redefined - Addressing the Wafer Transport Challenges
Global Demand for CHIPS continues to put immense pressure on device makers to increase capacity and throughput while maintaining quality. While majority of the digital fabs of today have highly Automated processes for wafer transport /handling and can afford the high cost of deploying those solutions , the Analog and legacy fabs around the globe rely on humans and extensive manual processes. These fabs have expanded over decades, converted office space into cleanrooms and employ hundreds of human workers as runners to push carts full of these expensive wafers from one process to the next. The aisleways and processing areas in these cleanrooms are filled with racks full of wafer boxes and it takes a lot of time and effort to retrieve those which ultimately results in waste of expensive cleanroom floor space, tool idle time, longer wait times, traffic congestion, potential to deliver a wrong lot, lost lots, increased risk to wafer quality and overall loss in productivity.
Traditional conveying systems are not always an ideal solution due to form factor, topography of these legacy fabs, installation & control system integration challenges in a 24X7 running fab, maintenance and having a high cost-of-ownership.
In this talk, the speaker will share disruptive, SMART manufacturing and controls agnostic technologies leveraging flexible and hybrid conveyance systems, which these Analog fabs can deploy to ensure the right wafer box is received at the right tool at the right time with minimal or no inference to their operations. To maximize expensive fab floor space, novel ways of designing automated stocking and retrieval systems leveraging digital twin technologies to handle large quantities of wafer boxes will be discussed. Leveraging these latest digital tools will allow fab operations to emulate, simulate, run important “ what if scenarios” and ROI calculations for efficient planning and decision making process of investing in a major infrastructure project.
The talk will conclude with a short “Clean room Re-imagined” video, which will highlight the impact of this intelligent conveyance system to these Analog and legacy fabs offering the much-desired labor productivity improvements with increased throughput without compromising on quality and yield .