The global challenge in the National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (NTRS) is to keep the semiconductor industry’s productivity engine on track by staying on the 25-30% per year manufacturing cost reduction curve. The industry has been successful in the past in driving down the curve by using feature size reductions and wafer diameter increases. In the future, these two approaches will continue to be exploited but four factory level challenges will have to be addressed to keep the industry from getting derailed. The four challenges are: Escalating factory cost; Factory investment risk and time factors; Overall Factory Effectiveness; and Process / Factory complexity. Factory capital costs are escalating over time up an exponential curve. With the escalating factory costs comes escalating investment risk. Future factories will need faster design, construction, tool installation and ramp in order to pay back in a reasonable time period. Improved bottleneck and average tool OEE are needed. In the future, incoming equipment in an operation will need to have a higher initial OEE and reach maturity quicker. Processes (driven by smaller feature sizes and larger wafer diameters) and factories (driven by economy of scale) will be increasingly complex in the future. This complexity is increasing exponentially. The systems capability to deal with the complexity is evolving at a slower pace resulting in a "data overload gap". These factors drive the need for improved decision support capability. Future factories will require more tool to tool automation, better wafer and die traceability and improved material control systems. Software content in equipment is growing by more than 25% per year. To prevent this increased amount of software complexity from derailing effective factory operation, more reliable and predictable software will be required. This presentation will review the trends, issues and potential solutions for these four difficult factory level challenges.