European Semiconductor Fabrication Facility · Semiconductor
Semiconductor fabrication equipment is extraordinarily expensive to maintain and replace. Unplanned downtime in a fab costs approximately $2M per hour in lost production. The facility was processing 8% of sensor data from their 340 pieces of critical equipment — the rest was dropped at the edge to manage data pipeline costs. Predictive maintenance models built on sampled data were missing early failure signatures that only appeared consistently at full sensor coverage.
Full sensor coverage across all 340 critical equipment assets. LLM reasoning configured to identify progressive degradation signatures specific to each equipment type, with maintenance recommendations delivered to the operations team 72-96 hours before predicted failure.
"Unplanned downtime at $2M per hour is an existential risk. We were predicting failures from 8% of the available signal. Moving to full coverage was the single highest-ROI infrastructure decision we've made."
Director of Fab Operations
The most significant early win was identifying a class of pump failures that had been categorized as random and unpredictable for three years. Full sensor coverage revealed a consistent 14-day degradation signature preceding each failure — a pattern that became statistically significant only when all sensor channels were included in the analysis. Scheduled replacement based on this signature eliminated the failure class entirely within 6 months.