Patent ID: 7496423

Claim:
A method of achieving fault tolerance for a photovoltaic factory, comprising: disposing a batch 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; batch processing the work-pieces within the individual processing lines without transferring work-pieces between the processing lines, the batch 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; batch array transferring a plurality of work-pieces between processing lines at the one or more buffer or stocker stations at a location before the shut-down tool of the first processing line; batch array receiving the plurality of transferred work-pieces into a second processing line; and increasing throughput for the second processing line 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.