Dick Deininger discusses Advanced Process Control technology in wafer fabs at AMD in this 2003 interview. Topics covered include: How suppliers rate them, the spectrum between fabbed, fablite, and fabless semiconductor manufacturing. In the early 2000s, a visionary team began to develop the first functional wafer fab AI decision making system under the leadership of one of the industry’s greatest manufacturing legends, Gary Heerssen. The team’s lineage was from TI’s and IBM’s fully automated fabs built in the seventies and eighties. They took the lessons they learned there to build a system that would enable them to compete against companies with five times their resources. The system they built was composed of 3 parts: advanced process control, integrated production scheduling, and yield management systems to keep a fab operating efficiently.