Manufacturing Equipment Connectivity solutions for Smart Manufacturing and Industry 4.0

Cimetrix Incorporated's award-winning products leverage open-architecture designs and industry standards to deliver equipment connectivity and control software.

We specialize in using Microsoft operating systems and development environments to fine-tune our products to work with a single platform while leveraging a large talent pool of software engineers. That means that our products are reliable, easy to maintain, and economical. Moreover, a large group of companies offer supporting tools and technologies to augment your development environment. By following Agile Development processes and using disciplined testing procedures, we are able to meet the stringent reliability requirements of today's automated factories. This software development core competence is the foundation of all our products.

Cimetrix Connectivity Group within PDF Solutions offers a complete set of proven and tested solutions that enable faster time to market and factory acceptance for our customers.

The company is a Microsoft Partner.

Equipment Connectivity for the Smart Factory

Equipment connectivity products are used in automated manufacturing equipment to enable them to communicate with the factory information and control systems that run an overall plant. In mature industries, the communications between equipment and factory systems is governed by precisely defined standards that leverage common computing and networking platforms while providing the specific command, control, and data collection capabilities required for efficient and effective operations.

SECS/GEM Software Solutions

The SECS/GEM standard is most widely adopted standard for the range of equipment types in the semiconductor (front end and back end), flat panel display, electronics assembly (PCB fabrication, surface mount technology), photovoltaic, HB-LED, and other similar manufacturing industries. The SECS/GEM standard defines messages, state machines, and scenarios to enable factory software to control and monitor manufacturing equipment. Moreover, because the GEM standard was written with very few semiconductor-specific features, it can be applied to virtually any manufacturing equipment in any industry.

GEM300 Software Solutions

With the transition to 300mm wafers, the level of factory automation in the semiconductor fabs increased significantly. SEMI introduced the GEM300 standards to allow this dramatic change to be implemented as cost-effectively as possible. Compliance with the SEMI 300mm communication standards is no longer optional. 300mm semiconductor factories require equipment suppliers to fulfill the standards in order to implement factory automation.

EDA/Interface A Software Solutions

Industry experts developed the EDA/Interface A standards to support the data acquisition performance, flexibility, and data quality requirements for advanced wafer fabs. The stakeholders in these factories use EDA for a wide range of applications, including online Fault Detection and Classification (FDC), lot-level and wafer-level Advanced Process Control (APC), equipment and factory throughput optimization, preventive maintenance, yield management, and other factory analytics. These standards complement the SECS/GEM standards, which remain in place for providing MES connectivity.

The EDA/Interface A standards use common networking hardware and software, specifically SOAP/XML messages over an HTTP or HTTPS connection.

Equipment Control for the Smart Factory

The semiconductor, photovoltaic, and related electronics manufacturing communities are constantly striving to improve efficiency and optimize productivity. Recognizing that many of these companies are looking for equipment control solutions that could span a wide range of manufacturing processes, Cimetrix developed CIMControlFramework™, an automation framework that supports a broad set of equipment capabilities.

Since many of our clients' requirements for equipment control also include the need to support SEMI connectivity standards, such as GEM, GEM300, and EDA/Interface A, these capabilities are pre-integrated into CIMControlFramework as a standard option.