Exhibiting at SEMICON Taiwan for the second time in as many years, Cimetrix significantly expanded its presence at the show with a booth in the Smart Manufacturing Pavilion. Like last year, we shared an exhibit with one of our Taiwan partner companies, Flagship International.

Since the semiconductor industry is one of the most important economic engines in Taiwan, this year’s Gala Dinner at the Grand Hyatt featured an excellent and supportive speech by the country’s new President, Dr. Ing-Wen Tsai. Taiwan’s tech industries have had a solid year thus far, leading other regions of the world and capturing additional market share.

In recent years, SEMI has increased its emphasis on focused “educational” forums at its SEMICON shows, and set a new high-water mark at SEMICON Taiwan with 20 of these events ranging from Design to Materials to Packaging to Overseas Investmen. Cimetrix was privileged to be named as one of the speakers at the Smart Manufacturing Forum, which included presentations by a variety of thought leaders from UMC, Rockwell Automation, ASE, and others. Alan Weber represented Cimetrix with a presentation entitled “Realizing Smart Manufacturing in Semiconductor Industry with SEMI Standards,” making the case that the industry’s factories already embody many of the characteristics of a Smart Manufacturing environment by virtue of the latest generations of SEMI Standards that support the required connectivity and control capabilities.

As a specific example, the UMC “Big Data to Manufacturing Excellence” presentation by Mr. James Lin described the “Wait Time Waste” analysis application, which is directly enabled by the SEMI E168 (Product Time Measurement) standard and the underlying detailed equipment event data called for in the E164 (EDA Common Metadata) standard.

To support the level of ongoing activity at the show and elsewhere in Taiwan, the Cimetrix contingent also included Derek Lindsey and Kerry Iwamoto, shown here during one of quieter moments in the booth.

Another highlight of the week for Cimetrix was participation in the eMDC (e-Manufacturing & Design Collaboration Symposium), now in its 10th year in Taiwan. Alan Weber made a presentation entitled “The Role of Models in Semiconductor Smart Manufacturing” that echoed a number of the messages shared at the Smart Manufacturing Forum but with heavier emphasis on the manufacturing applications that are enabled.

The basic idea is that most of the information required to support generic process monitoring and calculation of productivity KPIs is now mandated by the latest generation of equipment model standards, and this promises to drastically reduce the factory cost of developing and integrating these applications.
 
On a final note, in discussing the use of the SEMI EDA standards for critical production applications with a number of the leading chip makers during the week, it seems that we are now very close to an industry tipping point for the adoption of this technology. This has been a long time in coming, and opens up a realm of exciting new possibilities for consumers of detailed equipment and process data!