ROHM Co., Ltd. is optimizing the application of quantum technology to its semiconductor mass production lines and will begin full-scale implementation early next year. This achievement marks a world first for a large-scale semiconductor manufacturing plant.

ROHM has been jointly introducing quantum technology to the EDS process, which is part of the semiconductor manufacturing process, in January 2023 in collaboration with Quanmatic (headquarters: Shinjuku, Tokyo) to demonstrate combination optimization in the manufacturing process. The company announced on the 5th that it has achieved certain results in improving production efficiency and will push for full-scale introduction in April 2024.

This is a world first, demonstrating the optimization of manufacturing processes using quantum technology on a large-scale production line in a semiconductor manufacturing plant.

Recently, attempts are being made to utilize quantum technology in various fields. In particular, quantum annealing is being rapidly adopted in combinatorial optimization fields, such as delivery route optimization in the logistics industry.

On the other hand, in the semiconductor industry, the number of combinations increases exponentially as the manufacturing process becomes larger, and since there are many constraints, it is difficult to obtain an optimal solution, so it is only introduced to processes of a scale that can be approximately calculated on classical computers.

Even in the EDS process, because the number of combinations of manufacturing devices, test equipment, and test conditions is enormous, it was very difficult to derive a solution that optimized the manufacturing process even if limited to a part of the process.

Therefore, in the past, it was common to perform operations (allocation of processes) by utilizing accumulated knowledge and know-how based on basic calculation rules.

Under these circumstances, ROHM and Quanmatic began reviewing an operational system using quantum solutions that take into account various constraints in the EDS process starting in January 2023.

By combining Quanmatic's product line of quantum computation technology efficiency enhancement products based on research at Waseda University and Keio University, computational frameworks utilizing quantum and classical computational techniques, and specialized formalization technology, with the extensive knowledge, know-how, and various data accumulated by ROHM to date, the company successfully built a prototype in September 2023.

As a result of testing and verification of this prototype at ROHM's domestic and overseas factories, we obtained empirical results showing that target indicators such as operating rate and delivery delay rate can be improved by several percent each. Through algorithmization, calculation time is also significantly reduced, enabling optimal operations to be performed in real time according to changes in manufacturing conditions.

Going forward, ROHM and Quanmatic will further strengthen their collaboration and conduct test runs at overseas factories to improve the precision of the operation system, with the goal of full-scale introduction in April 2024.