Industry News, Trends and Technology, and Standards Updates

by Alan Weber

Director of Value-Added Products

Advanced Software Solutions for Equipment Health and Productivity Monitoring

On April 18^, 2013, SYSTEMA GmbH and Cimetrix will host the second SYSTEMA Expert Day 2013 in Dresden, Germany. The focus will be on advanced software solutions for equipment health and productivity monitoring in the discrete manufacturing industries.

SYSTEMA chose the time and place for this event to make it convenient for attending the 2013 European APCM Conference, which will be held at the Dresden Hilton on April 15-17. 

There will be presentations from industry experts across the semiconductor supply chain, including semiconductor manufacturers, equipment suppliers, and software products and services suppliers.

The topics will address equipment-related challenges facing semiconductor manufacturers, and there will be discussions and demonstrations regarding:

• The best practices in data collection
• Fingerprinting  - equipment  health monitoring and fault diagnosis
• Wait Time Waste reduction using substrate-level equipment productivity tracking and analysis.
  
  

 

The agenda as it is currently:

There may be changes to the agenda, so check the SYSTEMA web page for the event for more details (see the link below).

The people who will get the most out of these presentations and discussions are

• Equipment and process engineers
• Field service engineers and system integration specialist
• Advanced process control specialists
• Automation technology developers and automation software product managers

By Dave Faulkner

Executive Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Cimetrix

SEMICON Japan 2012 was a great experience, and it was amazing to see the excitement and interest in new developments as the industry prepares for growth in 2013. We were able to showcase Cimetrix products at the booths of Meiden and Rorze, our distributors in Japan. We also displayed CIMControlFramework in the MKS Instruments booth.

Meiden and Rorze demonstrated CIMPortal 2 for the many OEMs we have in Japan currently using CIMPortal 1.x.  CIMPortal 2 provides the tools for equipment companies to comply with the SEMI E164 standard when they are implementing an EDA/Interface A connection. The E164 standard, approved by SEMI this year, was developed so that companies using EDA/Interface A connections can generate a more consistent and high-quality definition of their equipment’s model, as represented in the metadata file. The CIMPortal 2 toolkit includes many features that reduce development time and effort, including a drag-and-drop equipment model builder and compliance checker.

We also presented and demonstrated the Wait Time Waste (WTW) and Fingerprinting projects we are developing in collaboration with ISMI. Due to an emphasis on productivity improvement demands, many semiconductor fabs are very interested in hearing about how they can reduce costs using the WTW metrics and methods in development. Fabs are also interested in fingerprinting – also known as equipment health monitoring – in order to reduce the time to repair equipment and avoid downtime. Alan Weber, Director at Cimetrix, taped a presentation and demonstration of fingerprinting that was shown in the Meiden and Rorze booths.

We also highlighted our CIMControlFramework equipment software framework at the Meiden, Rorze, and MKS Instruments booth. OEMs are looking for an equipment control software solution they can use for high-volume applications, and they like the concept of being able to manage the development in-house. By using a flexible, extensible, configurable framework, OEMs can implement custom extensions for new customers and design the next generation of system internally, allowing them to maintain control of their own development process. Rorze now offers not only CIMControlFramework as a stand-alone product, but also packaged with robot hardware including EFEMs and Vacuum Platforms.

Kerry Iwamoto, the Managing Director of Cimetrix Japan K.K., and I presented at the SEMI Productivity Standards Workshop, which focused on Wait Time Waste. This workshop, which was one of the better-attended sessions, presented new proposed standards development activities to improve manufacturing productivity and reduce costs. Kerry and I described plans for developing a SEMI standard for Wait Time Waste methods and metrics that will allow semiconductor fabs to measure product wait time and use that data to reduce waste and cycle time. We showed how the WTW Reference Implementation (WTWRI) developed by Cimetrix can help fabs pinpoint process delays and determine how to reduce them.

Japan is going through some tough times both politically and in their semiconductor industry. But now is the time to work closely with high volume OEMs in Japan as they retool their strategy for the next phase of semiconductor growth.

By Alan Weber
Director of Value-Added Products, Cimetrix Inc.

One of the subjects that was of great interest during our very successful SEMICON West 2012 experience was the Wait Time Waste project in which Cimetrix and ISMI/SEMATECH are collaborating. The interest in this project was widespread, and the reason is that, even though both OEMs and semiconductor fabs have focused on improving productivity for decades, they recognize they can still make significant progress with better and more actionable data.

What also intrigues the industry is how to overcome the challenges of gathering and employing the data. For example, there is no standard format for communication logs and equipment logs, and so both OEMs and fabs are discussing the possibility of s a common approach that will work for them. Moreover, the events that may be important to time waste analysis may not be consistently available from the equipment, and now both OEMs and fabs want to know how best to address this issue. Moreover, they want to understand how best to visualize the wafer processing time to determine where to focus their attention.

These issues, and many more, are discussed in the article I co-authored, “Wait Time Waste (WTW) Metrics, Methodology, and Support Tools”. This article first appeared in Future Fab International, Issue 42,  (c) 2012, www.future-fab.com/, published by Mazik Media, Mill Valley, CA. It not only discusses the background on the subject and the challenges the industry faces, but also discusses future directions for continual enhancement of the time waste analysis.

If you are interested in reading the article, visit: WTW Article.  Contact me at if you have comments or questions at alan.weber@cimetrix.com.

by Brett Horsley
Customer Support Engineer

The Cimetrix Support Team has developed a new web tool to provide active support customers with information about their software licenses.

You can access the new tool by logging in at the Cimetrix Customer License Generator page. Choose License Report from the pull down menu, and the page will populate your company’s Cimetrix software license information in a table.

Here is an example of what you will see:

You will be able to view the status of  all of the licenses your company purchased over the last 12 months, including information about whether the license is unassigned or assigned to a specific computer. You will also be able to see the MAC ID for any assigned licenses. To ease your internal reporting and communications, you can also download the history into a CSV file.

At Cimetrix, we constantly strive to provide outstanding support for our customers. Let us know how we can improve our support or communications.

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.

By: Alan Weber
Director of Value Added Products

We had a great time at SEMICON West as ISMI/SEMATECH and Cimetrix talked about our joint fingerprinting project. There was a lot of interest in fingerprinting, which is also sometimes known as equipment health monitoring (EHM) or signature analysis. In a semiconductor manufacturing context, fingerprinting is defined as “a set of data variables associated with the component being fingerprinted, sampled at some rate over a time period, transformed and then analyzed using a set of mathematical techniques, to generate a result representing the state of the unit during that timeframe.”

Both equipment suppliers and semiconductor fabs are interested in fingerprinting since currently there is no automated process to predict imminent equipment problems. Predictive maintenance applications are still in the R&D phase, so today, fabs are using statistical process control (SPC) to monitor equipment to predict potential problems, or fault detection after the machine fails or exhibits sub-optimal performance. With fingerprinting, the fab’s equipment engineers can monitor the behavior of key equipment components to predict imminent problems and alert the fab to take the necessary steps to prevent equipment failure.

Equipment engineers and process engineers at the fabs can also use fingerprinting to characterize newly delivered tools and establish a baseline for key component behavior across a range of operating points. What’s more, they can verify fingerprints of key equipment components during or after a production run to ensure the component process capability is in normal operating range. They might also define a special set of fingerprints to help understand why a particular tool has had an increase in FDC violations.

One of the points we explained to people about the project we are developing with ISMI is that the fingerprinting application is not dependent on any other Cimetrix software product. The application is standalone, and can be used on many different types of machines. Moreover, this application is for both new equipment in development as well as equipment currently deployed in the field.

If you would like to hear more about the fingerprinting project, or see a demo, contact Jackie Ferrell at ISMI, or go to Contact Cimetrix and tell us how we can connect.

By David Francis
Product Manager

We had a lot of interest in EDA/Interface A SEMI standards at our booth at SEMICON West 2012 in San Francisco during the week of July 9. Equipment Data Acquisition (EDA), also referred to as Interface A, is made up of SEMI standards SEMI E125, E134, E120, E132, and supporting standards. EDA offers semiconductor manufacturers the ability to collect a significant amount of data that is crucial to the manufacturing process, including descriptions of the equipment's structure and behavior. This data is represented on the tool as an equipment model, which is communicated to EDA clients as metadata sets. The metadata includes the equipment components, events, and exceptions, along with all the available data parameters.

One of the challenges with creating an equipment model and the resulting metadata sets is the variability with which the model can be created. It is possible for one tool to create a model that is compliant with the standards, but is quite different from the model for another tool, which is also standard compliant. This makes it difficult for the fabs to then reliably know where to find the data they are interested in from tool to tool. This issue has been addressed in SEMI Ballot 5002B which  defines the common metadata set that will support consistent implementation of EDA/Interface A Freeze Version II. Through our leadership role in the DDA Task Force, Cimetrix has played a major part in defining Ballot 5002B.

SEMI is in the final proof review of the standard that resulted from the5002B ballot, which SEMI will soon publish as the E164 Common Metadata Standard. With this new specification, equipment modeling will be more clearly defined and provide more consistent models between OEMs, which will make it easier for EDA/Interface A users to navigate models and find the data they need. Some semiconductor manufacturers, such as GLOBALFOUNDARIES, will require both compliance with E164 and validation of the compliance with the ISMI/SEMATECH Metadata Conformance Analyzer (MCA).

MCA is the industry standard means for automated checking for conformance of equipment metadata to applicable portions of the SEMI standards and ISMI guidelines. By using MCA, both OEMs and semiconductor manufacturers will be able to attain consistency in the representation of 300mm data, objects, and events within EDA/Interface A. Those supported standards include E30, E40, E87, E90, E94, E116, E157, and the new E164 standard.

One important thing to recognize is that, since it is possible to create a Freeze Version II compliant interface that will not pass MCA testing, understanding the requirements for compliance to both before beginning the design.

For more information about EDA/Interface A Freeze Version II, as well as the new E164 and MCA testing, contact us at Ask EDA/Interface A Question. We are recognized as one of the industry leaders in SEMI standards. Let’s talk and find out how we may be able to help.

This is an exciting time as we prepare for SEMICON West 2012 in San Francisco next week.  We have demonstrations of our products, and we are particularly excited to discuss two projects we are actively working on with ISMI. These projects, which are high priorities for ISMI’s member companies, are Fingerprinting, also known as Equipment Health Monitoring, and a Wait Time Waste Reference Implementation. Active ISMI companies on these project teams include Micron, Intel, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, IBM, and TSMC.

Fingerprinting

In Fingerprinting, the concept is to define and execute models for monitoring tool component behavior. Think of this as generating tool-specific EPIs (equipment performance indicators). Once that is done, we can compare the real-time results with both specifications and historical production values, and generate conclusions regarding the equipment. To support the process, companies can incorporate data from external sources, such a fab maintenance databases, or engineering databases.

Ultimately, OEMs will be able to ensure consistency of delivered equipment, reduce tool acceptance time and effort, and reduce their field service costs. Semiconductor fabs will be able to use this application to get detailed equipment component performance measurements, and monitor equipment health KPIs to get an early warning of any impending failures.

Wait Time Waste

ISMI’s Wait Time Waste project was initiated to develop metrics to measure time waste systematically, as well as defining the data collection and analysis methodology to apply these metrics. A potential industry standard will provide a common language to measure and identify wait time waste, and create a market for software suppliers to provide the measurement and analysis tools.

Semiconductor fabs will be able to identify sources of variation in basic tool throughput and establish an objective basis for productivity improvement. Equipment suppliers will also benefit by having the ability to improve their tool-level scheduling algorithms and measure their products’ performance levels.

Cimetrix project engineers will be available in the booth to demonstrate these applications and discuss how they can be of value to our customers and prospects. These types of projects represent a further broadening of Cimetrix’ capabilities into equipment- and factory-level analysis applications that leverage the company’s strengths in accessing and communicating high quality equipment data.

We hope to see you at Booth #1241 at SEMICON West!

If you are attending SEMICON West in San Francisco, and you are interested in learning more about the SEMI PV2 equipment communication standard, consider one of the events presented by the PVGroup and SEMI. 

The Standards Technical Education Program (STEP): PV2 - Guide for PV Equipment Communication Interfaces (PVECI), held at the San Francisco Moscone Center, Tuesday, July 10, 2012, from 1:00PM to 5:00PM (PDT) provides background information on the standard and technical explanations of GEM and PV2 (PVECI). Cimetrix personnel will be on hand to present at the workshop.

The course will explore the content, usage, and benefits of the PV2 communications standard and associated SEMI guidelines, and discuss how the PV2 standard can help make the solar power industry more competitive amid consolidation of suppliers and other recent trends.

The workshop will provide:

• Introduction and background of PV2 development

• Brief history of SEMI communications standards

• GEM concepts

• PV2 Messages

• PV2 Applications

• Implementation of the PV2 standard

Attendees will learn the rationale and context of PV2, understand the set of SEMI Standards involved, and how PV2 is applied to host communications for PV equipment. If you are an engineer designing equipment for solar panel production, or if you are a field service engineer working with solar companies, or if you are a manager, process engineer,  equipment buyer, or software engineer, you should take a look at how the program can give you insights and understanding that will help you in your current assignment.

If you are going to attend SEMICON West in San Francisco, July 10-12, 2012, at the Moscone Center – please visit us at booth #1241 and let us tell you how we can support your next equipment control project using our CIMControlFramework™ equipment automation software.

As more and more customers use CIMControlFramework software on different tool types (strip tools, MOCVD, defect inspection, chemical deposition, and a host of others), we have also generated training material in the form of labs our customers can use to help them get up to speed faster and learn how to implement designs easier and more effectively.

Come to our booth and take a look. When we demonstrate CIMControlFramework, we will show you the labs we supply with the software. Those labs include not only topics such as installation and fundamentals, but also sections such as scheduling and material movement, user interface development, and I/O and communications.

We can also discuss our product support and training classes that will help get your team up and running on SEMI factory connectivity standards, and their implementation, equipment control, and C# and Agile software development.

We look forward to seeing you at our booth at SEMICON West.