FabTime Newsletter Community Announcements Page
The FabTime newsletter welcomes the opportunity to share announcements of interest to the wafer fab operations community, including conference announcements, calls for papers, and product news.
The announcements below are from the FabTime Cycle Time Newsletter, Volume 26, No. 2, published on April 8, 2025. We have a photo-studded recap of the FOA Collaborative Forum, a brief list of other upcoming INFICON appearances at events, and an update about multi-language support in our AskJen fab productivity chat engine.
Past issues of the newsletter are available for subscribers to download in PDF format. Existing subscribers can find the archive link in your most recent email newsletter. New subscribers will see the link upon registering.
- Register for the newsletter here.
- Main article for Volume 26, No. 2: Is a standard definition for moves possible?
- Subscriber discussion forum for Volume 26, No. 2
- Reach out to newsletter editor Jennifer Robinson here.
Highlights of the February FOA Collaborative Forum
The February SEMI Fab Owners Alliance Collaborative Forum was a great time! Below: The INFICON team Autumn Watt, Jennifer Robinson, Emilio Martinez, Birender Kahlon, and John Behnke at the Thursday social (missing Joseph Carloni). Also pictured: the winning trivia team the WoMentors from the Women of FOA pre-meeting event, as well as the full group. Many thanks to the SEMI team for an excellent event, and to Wolfspeed for supporting Joe and Autumn in our INFICON case study presentation.
The next FOA meeting will be held April 30-May 1 at Honeywell’s fab in Plymouth, Minnesota.
Other Upcoming Events
In other conference news, INFICON’s Holland Smith and Gero Grau will be attending the APCm Conference in Prague this week. Holland will be presenting April 10 on “Maximum Happiness or Minimum Disappointment: The Science (and Politics) of Applying Multi-objective Optimization (MOOP) in Semiconductor Factory Scheduling.” INFICON will also be sponsoring a technical session on Smart Manufacturing at the 2025 Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference (ASMC) in Albany, NY on Wednesday, May 7.
Multi-language support is now available for our AskJen™ chat engine
In previous newsletters, we introduced AskJen™, our AI-powered chat engine. AskJen harnesses cutting-edge Large Language Model (LLM) technology combined with over 25 years of FabTime cycle time management newsletter issues to empower semiconductor professionals with instant answers to operational questions. Those of you who attended the February FOA may have had a chance to see a demo, or at least to take home one of our beautiful AskJen coasters.
Back at home, we’ve been continuing to test and improve AskJen, making it ever more responsive. Most recently, we’ve developed multi-language support to enhance the usability of AskJen for all of our customers.
Now, if you ask it a question in French, Japanese, German, or other language of choice, AskJen will provide a response in the same language. In effect, this enhancement makes our 25+ years of newsletter content available to a global audience. For example, here we ask in Chinese about the fundamental drivers of wafer fab cycle time.
Alternatively, you can enter your preferred response language as part of your question. On the next page is an example with a more complex question. We’ve requested a response that includes recommendations from multiple newsletter issues and asked for the results in English and German.
The multi-language support in AskJen opens up many excellent use cases for our customers around the world. AskJen is currently available for testing by FabTime customers. Reach out to Jennifer for more information.
For more reading from the FabTime newsletter, see:
- Main article for Volume 26, No. 2: Is a standard definition for moves possible?
- Subscriber discussion forum for Volume 26, No. 2
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