SEMI held the spring 2017 North American standards meetings during the week of April 3 at the new SEMI facility in Milpitas, CA. The new facility had only been occupied for a few weeks prior, yet SEMI was able to hold the meetings with few technical difficulties. The new facility is quite attractive with improved accommodations for standards meetings.

There is a lot of activity currently, in the two task forces that I lead; namely the GEM 300 task force and DDA task force.

Every five years SEMI re-approves every active standard. Without renewal, the standards become “inactive”. During the Information & Control Committee (I&CC) meeting a few standards were re-approved this cycle with a few editorial changes including:

• Ballot 6066A: E130 (Specification for Prober Specific Equipment Model for 300 mm Environment) and E130.1 (Specification for SECS-II Protocol for Prober Specific Equipment Model for 300 mm Environment) 
• Ballot 6068A: E116 (Specification for Equipment Performance Tracking) and E116.1 (Specification for SECS-II Protocol for Equipment Performance Tracking)
• Ballot 6064A: E121 (Guide for Style and Usage of XML for Semiconductor Manufacturing Applications)

Additionally, during the Information & Control Committee (I&CC) meeting, the following ballots were passed which make changes to standard:

• Ballot 5549A: E30 (Generic Model for Communications and Control of Manufacturing Equipment) with the following changes to the GEM standard
  • The title was changed to “Specification for the Generic Model for Communications and Control of Manufacturing Equipment”
  • The initial sections were reorganized to have sections Purpose, Scope, and Limitations which results in renumbering all following sections
  • The Application Notes were renamed Related Information
  • Equipment Constant “EnableSpooling” was added to the Variable Item List.
• Ballot 5738: E87.1 (Specification for SECS-II Protocol for Carrier Management)
  • Title was changed to remove the provisional status. All other references to provisional status were removed.
  • Numerous editorial changes were made for clarity, misspellings, incorrect references
  • Format codes were clarified for consistency
  • The only “technical” change was to allow for up to 255 slots in a carrier for attribute “Capacity”. This makes E87.1 more consistent with E87 which does not restrict carrier capacity and with known existing implementations that have more than 25 slots in a carrier. 

Ballot 5872B, an update to the E172 Specification for SECS Equipment Data Dictionary (SEDD), failed to pass. This update adds numerous optional features to the SEDD file for documenting GEM interfaces in an XML file. With this update, GEM interfaces can be documented almost entirely in an XML file; virtually eliminating the need for the traditional GEM documentation. The most valuable addition is the list of supported SECS-II messages and the expected format for each message. By documenting GEM interfaces in an XML file, factories can write software to parse the SEDD file and automatically configure host software to adapt to an equipment’s GEM implementation. The GEM 300 task force expects this ballot to pass later this year after making a few small changes.

In the next SEMI voting cycle for North America, called “Cycle 5”, the GEM 300 task force plans to resubmit ballot 5872C to update the E172 SEDD.

Additionally, a new ballot 6114 will be submitted for vote. Ballot 6114 introduces a new set of SECS-II messages for transfer of large strings or binary data. The new messages are initially intended for transfer of large Recipe files to/from the host system. Currently, the typical stream 7 SECS-II messages are limited to 16.7 MB. With these new messages, recipes could theoretically be allowed up to about 4 GB. Additionally, the new messages could be used to transfer other types of large strings or binary streams. The new messages include a “type” field to indicate the type of object being transferred. For recipes, field will most likely be “SEMI:RECIPE”, but other types could be defined in other standards like “ProductionRecipe” for E170 or “SEDD” for E172.

In the DDA Task Force, more plans were discussed for the EDA Freeze 3. The Korea DDA Task Force leaders have committed to working with North America DDA Task Force in this effort and presented several ideas for changes. The most dramatic change they presented was to consider using WebSocket technology instead of HTTP in order to make the SOAP/XML messages perform much better by maintaining a socket connection.

The GUI task force has begun its work to revise the E95 standard. It is still a great time for new task force members to join and contribute.

The Japan GEM 300 task force have previously made some announcements concerning a GEM300A initiative to expand the traditional GEM 300 standards (E30, E37, E39, E40, E87, E90, E94) to also include newer standards developed in the Japan GEM 300 task force. Namely E170, E171 and E174. E174 has been very controversial. During the North American GEM 300 task force meeting, it was requested that if there be any initiatives to declare a GEM300A set, that this be a collaborative effort between the various GEM 300 task forces and also consider including E116, E148, E157, E172 and E173.

During the GEM 300 task force, a representative from the Japan GEM 300 task force presented some possible future ideas to have a separate GEM connection for recipe management, to ensure that data collection reporting is not hindered by the transfer of large recipes files.