A chip manufacturing process involves four steps, each of which requires a single specialised piece of equipment. The first step is FEOL Processing which takes 0.05 minutes per chip. Then BEOL Processing takes 0.07 minutes per chip. This is followed by a Wafer Test where 400 chips are tested in a batch which takes 25 minutes. Finally, the Device Test machine tests 1500 chips per hour on a continuous basis.

(b) If the demand was for 1000 chips per hour, what additional equipment would you need to buy for the process to meet the demand? What would the new cycle time and balancing loss be for the process after adding the new equipment? (25 marks)

(c) What is the minimum throughput time of the process in (b) above for

a single chip (10 marks)

a batch of 400 chips? (10 marks)

(d) Taking the process in (b) above, consider a situation where due to quality problems 10% of the chips are faulty and have to go through the FEOL Processing step a second time before moving on to the next step. What impact does this have on the process in terms of cycle time and balancing loss? (30 marks)