Patent ID: 7640071

Claim:
A method of achieving fault tolerance for a photovoltaic factory, comprising: disposing a plurality of work-pieces into a factory, the factory comprising a plurality of substantially identical processing lines, each processing line having a plurality of processing tools coupled together, the factory further comprising one or more buffer or stocker stations between each processing line at a location adjacent to each processing tool; processing the work-pieces within the individual processing lines without transferring the work-pieces between the processing lines, the processing occurring at a predetermined optimum throughput that is below a maximum throughput; detecting a shut-down at one or more processing tools in a first processing line of the plurality of substantially identical processing lines; transferring the work-pieces from the first processing line to other processing lines at the one or more buffer or stocker stations at a location before the shut-down tool of the first processing line; receiving transferred work-pieces from the first processing line into the other processing lines; and increasing throughput for the other processing lines to a level above the optimum level in order to achieve fault tolerance and maintain a substantially constant throughput averaged over a predetermined period of time.