By David Francis
Product Manager

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about our SEMICON West experience and how we expected Ballot 5002B to soon be approved by SEMI as the E164 – EDA Common Metadata standard (see SEMICON West - Ballot 5002B Passes). E164 is now approved, and is available for download on SEMIViews at SEMI E164-0712 - Specification for EDA Common Metadata.

The purpose of the E164 specification is to encourage and promote those companies using EDA/Interface A connections to use a more common representation of equipment metadata that is based upon the SEMI E125 Specification for Equipment Self-Description. This will help establish more consistency from tool to tool and from fab to fab, making it easier for equipment vendors to provide a consistent EDA interface and for fabs to develop EDA clients.

The standard was developed because semiconductor equipment suppliers were developing equipment models that were compliant with the E125 standard, but very different from one equipment to the next. Even similar types of equipment had different models, which produced different metadata sets. That scenario was pretty frustrating for fabs as they tried to determine what data they could gather from each piece of equipment.

With E164 approved, equipment suppliers now have a standard they can use to generate the equipment models and fabs now have a standard they can use to generate their client side applications. GLOBALFOUNDRIES has been actively working to adopt the new E164 standard as part of their EDA acceptance criteria. This requirement will help accelerate the adoption of EDA/Interface A as well as the new E164 standard by OEMs and ultimately by other fabs.

Stay tuned – Cimetrix will have some solutions coming soon to support our customers through these changes. If you want to talk with us now about what we can do for an existing project, visit Contact Cimetrix.