Dick Deininger discusses Advanced Process Control technology in wafer fabs in this 2003 interview series. Dick Deininger on Advanced Process Control Where is APC used? Deininger, in the early 2000s, part of a visionary team that 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.