The time bottleneck in the manufacturing process of Besi (company involved in ESGI 149 Innsbruck) is the extraction of undamaged dies from a component wafer. The easiest way for them to speed up this process is to reduce the number of 'selections' made by the robotic arm. Each 'selection' made by this robotic arm can be thought of as choosing a 2x2 submatix of a large binary matrix, and editing the 1's in this submatrix to be 0's. The quesiton is: what is the fewest number of 2x2 submatrices required to cover the full matrix, and how can we find this number. This problem can be solved exactly using integer programming methods, although this approach proves to be prohibitively expensive for realistic sizes. In this talk I will describe the approach taken by my team at EGSI 149, as well as directions for further improvement.
