Industry News, Trends and Technology, and Standards Updates

In the EDA Best Practices blog series, we have discussed choosing a commercial software platform, using that package to differentiate your data collection capabilities and how to choose what types of data to publish. In this post we will review why you should choose to provide an E164-compliant equipment model.

What is E164?

Equipment Data Acquisition (EDA) - also referred to as Interface A - offers semiconductor manufacturers the ability to collect a significant amount of data that is crucial to the manufacturing process. This data is represented on the equipment as a model, which is communicated to EDA clients as metadata sets. The metadata, based upon the SEMI E125 Specification for Equipment Self-Description, includes the equipment components, events, and exceptions, along with all the available data parameters.

Since the advent of the SEMI EDA standards, developers and fabs have recognized that equipment models, and the resulting metadata sets, can vary greatly. It is possible to create vastly different models for similar pieces of equipment and have both models be compliant with the EDA standards. This makes it difficult for the factories to know where to find the data they are interested in from one type of equipment to another.

Recognizing this issue, the early adopters of the EDA standards launched an initiative in to make the transition to EDA easier and ensure consistency of equipment models and metadata from equipment to equipment. This effort resulted in the E164 EDA Common Metadata standard, approved in July 2012. Another part of this initiative was the development of the Metadata Conformance Analyzer (MCA), which is a utility that tests conformance to this standard. With this specification, equipment modeling is more clearly defined and provides more consistent models between equipment suppliers. This makes it easier for EDA/Interface A users to navigate models and find the data they need.

Power of E164

The E164 standard requires strict name enforcement for events called out in the GEM300 SEMI standards. It also requires that all state machines contain all of the transitions and in the right order as those called out in the GEM300 standards. This includes state machines in E90 for substrate locations and in E157 for process management. The states and transition names in these state machines must match the names specified in the GEM300 standards.

These requirements may seem unnecessarily strict, but implementing the common metadata standard results in:

• Consistent implementations of GEM300
• Commonality across equipment types
• Automation of many data collection processes
• Less work to interpret collected data
• Ability for true “plug and play” applications
• Major increases in application software engineering efficiency

Knowing that a model is E164 compliant allows EDA client applications to easily and programmatically define data collection plans knowing that the compliant models must provide all of the specified data with the specified names. For example, the following application is able to track carrier arrival and slotmap information as well as movement of material through a piece of equipment and process data for that equipment.

This application will work for any GEM300 equipment that is E164 compliant. The client application developer can confidently create data collection plans for these state machines, knowing that an E164-compliant model must provide the needed state machines and data with the proscribed names.

Decide to be E164 compliant

A number of leading semiconductor manufacturers around the globe have seen the power of requiring their equipment suppliers to provide EDA/E164 on their equipment, and now require it in their purchase specifications.

If you are a semiconductor manufacturer, you should seriously consider doing the same because it will greatly simplify data collection from the equipment (and most of your candidate suppliers probably have an implementation available or underway.

If you are an equipment supplier and your factory customers have not required that your EDA models be E164 compliant, you should still seriously consider providing this capability anyway as a way to differentiate your equipment. Moveover, E164-compliant models are fully compliant with all other EDA standards. Finally, it is much easier and more cost effective to create E164-compliant models from the outset than it is to create non-compliant models and then convert to E164 when the factory requires it.

Conclusion

The purpose of the E164 specification is to encourage companies developing EDA/Interface A connections to implement a more common representation of equipment metadata. By following the E164 standard, equipment suppliers and factories can establish greater consistency from equipment to equipment and from factory to factory. That consistency will make it easier and faster for equipment suppliers to provide a consistent EDA interface, and for factories to develop EDA client applications.

The old adage “You get what you pay for” doesn’t fully apply to equipment automation interfaces… more accurately, you get what you require, and then what you pay for!

This is especially true when considering the range of capability that may be provided with an equipment supplier’s implementation of the EDA (Equipment Data Acquisition, also known as Interface A) standards. Not only is it possible to be fully compliant with the standard while delivering an equipment metadata model that contains very little useful information, the standards themselves are also silent on the topics of Performance and Data Quality.  So you must take extra care to state these requirements and expectations in your purchase specifications if you expect the resulting interface to support the demands of your factory’s data analysis and control applications. Moreover, to the extent these requirements can be tested, you should describe the test methods and tools that you will use in the acceptance process to minimize the chance of ugly surprises when the equipment is delivered.

We have covered the importance of and process for creating robust purchase specifications in a previous posting. This post will focus specifically on aspects of Performance and Data Quality within that context.

Scope of Performance and Data Quality Requirements

From a scope standpoint, Performance and Data Quality requirements are found in a number of sections in an automation specification. The list below is just a starting point suitable for any advanced wafer fab – your needs may extend and exceed these significantly.

Here are some sample requirements that pertain to the computing platform for the EDA interface software:

• The interface computer should have the capability of a 4-core Intel i5 or i7 or better, with processing speed of 2+ GHz, 8 GB of RAM, and 500 GB of persistent storage with at least 50% available at all times.
• The equipment must monitor key performance parameters of the EDA computing platform such as CPU utilization (%), memory utilization (GB, %), disk utilization (GB, %) and access rate, etc. using system utilities such as Perfmon (for Windows systems) and store this history either in a log file or in some part of the equipment metadata model.
• The network interface card must support 1 GB per second (or faster) communications.

In the area of equipment model content, the following requirements are directly related to interface performance and data quality:

• The equipment should make the EDA computing platform performance parameters available as parameters of an E120 logical element that represents the EDA interface software itself.
• The supplier must provide a written description of the update rates, recommended sampling intervals, normal operating ranges and behaviors, and high/low/rate-of-change limits for all key process parameters. These will be used to design data quality filters in the data path between the equipment and the consuming applications/users.
• Equipment parameters provided through the EDA interface must exhibit a number of data quality characteristics, including, but not limited to: an internal sampling/update rate sufficient to represent the underlying signal accurately; timing of trace reports that is consistent with the sampling interval within +/- 1.0%; values in adjacent trace reports must contain then-current values at the specified sampling interval; and rejection of obvious outliers.

Advanced users of the EDA standards are now raising their expectations for the equipment to provide self-monitoring and diagnosis capability in the form of built-in data collection plans (DCPs), as expressed in some of the following requirements:

• The supplier must provide built-in DCPs to support common equipment performance monitoring, diagnostic, and maintenance processes that are well known to the supplier. Documentation for these DCPs must define their purpose, activation conditions, interface bandwidth consumed, and the types of analysis the collected data enables.
• The supplier must describe the operating conditions that can lead to a PerformanceWarning situation for the EDA interface.
• The supplier must describe the algorithms used to deactivate DCPs under PerformanceWarning conditions. These might include LIFO (i.e., the last DCP activated is the first to be deactivated), decreasing order of bandwidth consumed or “size” (in terms of total # of parameters and # of trace/event requests), etc.

Because of the power and complexity of the DCP structure defined in the EDA standards, it is not sufficient to specify the raw communications performance requirement as a small number of isolated criteria, such as total bandwidth (in parameters per second) or minimum sampling interval. Rather, since the EDA interface must support a variety of data collection client demands for a wide range of production equipment, these requirements should be expressed as combinations of sampling interval, # parameters per DCP, # of simultaneously active DCPs, group size, buffering interval, response time for ad hoc “one-shot” DCPs, maximum latency of event generation after the related equipment condition occurred, consistency of timestamps in trace reports with the specified sampling interval, and perhaps others.

Moreover, some equipment types may have more stringent performance requirements than others, depending on the criticality of timely data for the consuming applications… so there may be process-specific performance requirements as well.

Measurement and Testing

Methods for measuring and testing the above requirements should also be described in the purchase specifications so the equipment suppliers can know they are being successfully addressed during the development process and can demonstrate compliance before and after shipping the equipment. Clarity at this phase saves time and expense later on.

Examples of such requirements include:

• The supplier must test the EDA interface across the full range of performance criteria specified above and provide reports documenting the results.
• An earlier requirement states that the EDA interface must be capable of reporting at least 2000 parameters at a sampling interval of 0.1 seconds (10Hz) with a group size of 1, for a total data collection capacity (bandwidth) of 20,000 parameters per second. In addition to this overall bandwidth capability, the supplier must demonstrate that this performance is possible over a range of specific data collection deployment strategies, meaning different #s and sizes of DCPs, different sampling intervals, group sizes, etc. without causing the EDA interface to reach one of its “Performance Warning” states or overstress its computing platform. To this end, all combinations of the following data collection configuration settings must be run for at least 15 seconds each; assuming the equipment has n processing modules:
  • Trace intervals (in seconds): 1, 0.5, 0.2, 0.1 (and 0.05 if possible)
  • # of parameters per DCP: 10, 50, 100, 250, 500, 1000 (and 2000 if possible)
  • # of DCPs: 1, 2, 3, … to n
  • Group size: 10, 5, 2, 1
• The test client should be run on a separate computing platform with sufficient computing power to “stay ahead” of the EDA interface computer; in other words, the EDA interface should never have to wait on the client system.
• Test reports should indicate the start and stop time of each iteration (i.e., one combination of the above settings), and verify that the timestamps of the data collection reports sent by the EDA interface are within +/- 1% of the value expected if the samples were collected exactly at the specified trace interval.

Performance parameters of the EDA interface platform should also be monitored during the tests and included in the report. These parameters should include memory usage, CPU processing load, and disk access rate (and perhaps others) for all processes that constitute the EDA interface software.

This approach is shown in tabular form for a 2-chamber tool (see below); since Group Size does not (or should not) impact the effective parameters per second rate, it is not shown in the table.

• A summary report for all performance tests that show acceptable message generation and transmission timing across the full range of data collection test criteria must be available.
• Detailed SOAP logs for specific performance tests must be available on request.

In Conclusion

We hope you now have some appreciation for the importance of solid requirements in this area, and can accurately assess how well your current purchase specifications express your actual needs. If you want to know more about a well-defined process for improving your specifications, or have any other questions regarding the status and outlook of the EDA standards, and how they can be implemented, please contact us.

Cimetrix just finished exhibiting at SEMICON Southeast Asia for the first time. And a grand entrance it was. Located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, this is one of the regional SEMICON shows put on by SEMI, a global industry association serving the manufacturing supply chain for the electronics industry. Southeast Asia is a hotbed for semiconductor backend and PCBA (SMT) industries. With our new employee Raymund Yeoh located in Penang, Malaysia; combined with our distribution partner Electrotek based out of Singapore, Cimetrix now has a strong presence to support Industry 4.0 adoption in Southeast Asia. 

By working closely with SEMI, Cimetrix had a new booth in the SEMI Smart Manufacturing Pavilion and an impressive demonstration in the SEMI Smart Manufacturing Journey.

Our new booth emphasized (1) our global reach as the world’s largest supplier of equipment connectivity and control software, (2) our new Sapience^TM factory side platform which has beta installations at select major EMS and electronics manufacturing sites, and (3) our new EquipmentTest^TM connectivity tester designed to make equipment connectivity easier than ever before.

Our booth was extremely busy the whole time with demonstrations of Sapience and EquipmentTest. We gave out vouchers for free copies of EquipmentTest to booth visitors which generated excitement and will increase learning for GEM connectivity in Southeast Asia. It was interesting to see the number of factory engineers and managers who visited us seeking help with getting their equipment connected for traceability and OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness). And we had the answers. Right next door to our booth was the SEMI Smart Manufacturing Journey which had guided tours demonstrating the use of Industry 4.0 throughout the electronics manufacturing supply chain. Our job was to demonstrate data collection using standards from live equipment in real time displaying OEE charts and data for each tour to witness. Setting this up can take months in a factory. Our Smart Factory Business Team is out to turn this problem upside down. They connected to all 4 live equipment in one day and were ready to go at the start of the show. And we are ready to do that in factories too. 

Here is Mike and Jesse giving a demonstration to a tour group. The equipment is located right behind the crowd for all to see; with Sapience displaying data and the crowd taking pictures. SEMI did a great job organizing this. We had top government officials, factories, equipment manufacturers, electronics distributors and universities come through the tours. We also exceeded expectations by adding artificial intelligence to the demonstration. Amazon Alexa was integrated into Sapience which allowed us to ask Alexa which factory was most productive last week. Alexa and Sapience analyzed the data and gave the answer to the tour crowd.

We have many new opportunities to follow up; and we will be working with SEMI on how to help companies in Southeast Asia learn and adopt Industry 4.0.

Following the show, our team spread out to visit the rapidly growing Cimetrix customer base in Penang, Korea, India and China with support from our local teams. See you next year in SEMICON Southeast Asia!

 

A few years ago, I went through the process of building a new house. It was exciting to work with the architect to design the house and imagine what the finished product was going to be like. The architect created a 40-page set of drawings detailing all the components that would go into the house, like the electrical, plumbing and flooring. I thought everything was covered. I was a little surprised when things didn’t go exactly as detailed in the drawings. There were exceptions! However, having the detailed drawings made it easier to identify where things went wrong and helped clarify what needed to be done to correct the problems.

Communication standards like GEM are like a set of architectural drawings for how to connect equipment to factory control systems. They define what needs to be communicated, how the communication needs to take place and provide a great roadmap for getting there. But like building a new house, there are usually a few surprises along the way. A standard, consistent way of testing the interface that can be used by both the factory and equipment manufacturer, greatly reduces the unknown and simplifies the process.

The new Cimetrix EquipmentTest™ product is the fastest way to achieve GEM Compliance for factory acceptance testing of new equipment. Whether you are an equipment manufacturer or factory, making sure the equipment interface is GEM compliant is critical. Having an easy-to-use testing solution to determine if the equipment is GEM compliant is critical.

There are two versions of EquipmentTest depending on your needs. The EqupmentTest Basic version is ideal for both Smart factories and equipment manufacturers to quickly and easily test the basic capabilities of an equipment’s GEM interface. EquipmentTest Basic includes a simple testing scenario, called a plugin, to evaluate the equipment’s ability to connect to a GEM host and communicate events, data and alarms. This version also includes the ability to send/receive individual messages to/from the equipment for discovery or diagnostic purposes. With the messaging functionality, you can also create macros to send and receive groups of messages.

For more complex testing, there is the EquipmentTest Pro version. In addition to all the features of the EquipmentTest Basic version, EquipmentTest Pro includes a full, rigorous GEM compliance testing plug-in and an operational GEM compliance testing plugin. The Pro version includes development tools to allow you to create your own custom tests/plug-ins using .NET languages. The GEM compliance plugin generates a GEM compliance statement that shows the areas and level of compliance to the GEM standards. There are also other tools only available in the EquipmentTest Pro version that allow you easily test and interact with the GEM functionality on the equipment.

As with all our products, Cimetrix supports the industry connectivity standards so you never have to wonder if your equipment is keeping up with the rest of the industry.

You can purchase either version of EquipmentTest directly from our website and download the software immediately. You will need to provide a valid Mac ID and email address for licensing purposes. You will receive your license agreement no more than 48 hours after purchase. Be sure to learn more and get your EquipmentTest download today!

A question that job seekers should always ask of potential employers is, “Why should I work in your industry?” It is an important question when you consider that only 60 of the original Fortune 500 companies from 1955 are still in existence in 2017. Changing customer tastes, mergers, technology and many other reasons are responsible for this, but it does give us at least one key takeaway: the company I start my career with probably won’t be the one I end it with. As a result, it is important to ensure the industry you go into will be able to stand the test of time.

When one enters an industry, be it as an engineer or an accountant, you begin to build specialized knowledge of that industry within your field. This provides you with a competitive advantage in the job market of that industry. Companies are willing to pay more for an engineer with experience in their industry than one they will have to train. If you suddenly find the industry you are in obsolete, all of your specialized knowledge becomes likewise obsolete. For example, someone who was an engineer in the cathode ray tube industry may not find themselves as competitive for the top jobs anymore. 

The electronics manufacturing industry is an exciting place to be, and there is no immediate replacement or end in sight. When you join a company like Cimetrix you have the opportunity to develop and support the software that runs manufacturing equipment in factories worldwide. Those factories create computer memory and processor chips, RF and microwave transmitters, sensors and actuators of all shapes and sizes, power devices and amplifiers, display drivers, and many more items that go into the electronics we use every day. 

You are also part of an industry that meets the demands of many different and diverse end users, providing some shelter from the ups and downs of any particular market. When cell phones became less popular in favor of smart phones, the demand for new products didn’t go away—it simply changed the type of products were called for. 

One specific benefit of life at Cimetrix is that we are an integral part of the the electronics manufacturing and related industriesy. We often refer to one another as family, we take care of each other, celebrate our successes and create an environment where people enjoy coming to work. We have very competitive benefits and compensation, so we can pay you what you are worth. Many employees even have the option of working from home up to three days a week, saving them wear and tear on their vehicles (and their nerves from driving in traffic!).

If you are ready to join an exciting, dynamic, growing and fun industry, please check out our open positions.

In the first blog of this series, Clare Liu of Cimetrix China made the compelling case for choosing a commercial software platform for implementing the equipment side of the EDA (Equipment Data Acquisition) standards interface rather than developing the entire solution in-house. 

Whenever this “make vs. buy” decision is discussed, however, the following question inevitably arises: “If we choose a standard product for this, how can we differentiate the capabilities of our equipment and its data collection capability from our competitors?” It’s a great question which deserves a well-reasoned answer.

Platform Choice and System Architecture

Most advanced fabs use EDA to feed their on-line FDC (Fault Detection and Classification) applications, which are now considered “mission-critical.” This means if the FDC application is down for any reason, the equipment is considered down as well. It is therefore important to choose a computing platform for the EDA interface that is highly reliable and has enough processing “headroom” to support the high bandwidth requirements of these demanding, on-line production applications. Moreover, this platform should not be shared by other equipment communications, control, or support functions, since these may adversely impact the processing power available for the EDA interface. 

Surprisingly, this approach is not universally adopted, and has been a source of problems for some suppliers, so it is an area of potential differentiation. 

Adherence to Latest Standards 

The automation requirements for the most advanced fabs call for the latest versions (Freeze II) of all the standards in the EDA suite, including the EDA Common Metadata (E164) standard. Dealing with older versions of the standard in the factory systems creates unnecessary work and complexity for the fab’s automation staff, so it is best to implement the latest versions from the outset. The Cimetrix CIMPortal Plus product makes this a straightforward process using the model development and configuration tools in its SDK (Software Development Kit), so there is absolutely no cost penalty for providing the latest generation of standards in your interface.

It takes time and effort for equipment suppliers with older versions of the standards to upgrade their existing implementations, so this, too, is an opportunity for differentiation.

Equipment Metadata Model Content

This is probably the area with the largest potential for competitive differentiation, because it dictates what a factory customer will ultimately be able to do with the interface. If an equipment component, parameter, event, or exception condition is not represented in the equipment model as implemented in the E120 (Common Equipment Model) and E125 (Equipment Self-Description), and E164 (EDA Common Metadata) standards, the data related to that element cannot be collected. In effect, the metadata model IS the data collection “contract” between the equipment supplier and the fab customer.

This is why the most advanced fabs have been far more explicit in their automation purchase specifications with respect to equipment model content, going so far as to specify the level of detailed information they want to collect about process performance, equipment behavior, internal control parameters, setpoints and real-time response of common mechanisms like material handling, vacuum system performance, power generation, consumables usage, and the like. This level of visibility into equipment operation is becoming increasingly important to achieve the required yield and productivity KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for fab at all technology nodes.

The argument about “who owns this level of information about equipment behavior” notwithstanding, providing the detailed information the fabs want in a structure that makes it easy to find and access is a true source of differentiation.

Self-Monitoring Capability

If you really want to set your equipment apart from your competitors, consider going well beyond simply providing access to the level of information needed to monitor equipment and process behavior and include “built-in” Data Collection Plans (DCPs) that save your customers the effort of figuring out what data should be collected and analyzed to accomplish this. Your product and reliability engineering teams probably already know what the most prevalent failure mechanisms are and how to catch them before they cause a problem… why not provide this knowledge in a form that makes it easy to deploy?

A few visionary suppliers are starting to talk about “self-diagnosing” and “self-healing" equipment… but it will be a small and exclusive group for a while – join them.

Readiness for Factory Acceptance

Before the fab’s automation team can fully integrate a new piece of equipment, it must follow a rigorous acceptance process that includes a comprehensive set of interface tests for standards compliance, performance, and reliability. This process is vital because solid data collection capability is fundamental for rapid process qualification and yield ramp that shorten a new factory’s “time to money.” If you know what acceptance tests and related software tools the fab will use (which is now explicit in the latest EDA purchase specifications), you can purchase the same software tools, perform and document the results of these same tests before shipping the equipment. 

This will undoubtedly speed up the acceptance process, and your customers will thank you for the effort you took to put yourself in their shoes. Incidentally, this usually means the final invoice for the equipment will be paid sooner, which is always a good thing.

In Conclusion

In this posting, we have only scratched the surface regarding the sources of competitive differentiation. As you can see, choosing a commercial platform enables this far more readily than the in-house alternative, because it allows your development team to focus on the topics above rather than worrying about compliance to the standards. If you’d like to know more, please give us a call or click below to talk schedule a meeting. 

IPC Apex Expo is one of the largest gathering of professionals from the printed circuit board and electronics manufacturing industry (EMS). Attendees and exhibitors come from around the world to participate in the expo, the technical conferences and Standards Development meetings. This is the third year in a row that Cimetrix has exhibited at the IPC Apex conference.Cimetrix features the latest in Smart Factory and Equipment Connectivity technology. For the show this year, we chose to upgrade our booth space, allowing us to have more meeting room within the booth as well as several prominent demo stations in each corner. We also featured a popular Virtual Reality station in our booth. We brought a great team of ten to the show this year to staff the booth, give demo’s and greet the many attendees who stopped by throughout the 3 day expo.

We chose to participate in the popular Passport to Prizes game for the second year in a row. This sponsorship is a great tool to get the Cimetrix name out in the industry. It also brings in many attendees to our booth for some great conversations about our products and services.

We also had to opportunity for the Cimetrix Vice-President and General Manager of Smart Factory Business, Ranjan Chatterjee, to be interviewed by SCOOP TV both one-on-one and as part of a larger panel discussion. You can view Ranjan's one-on-one interview in the Cimetrix Resource Center.

To learn more about our products or services, you can schedule a meeting any time. 

As part of the CIMControlFramework (CCF) product for creating equipment control applications, Cimetrix developed a logging package. Our logging package has two parts – collecting the log messages and analysis of the messages.

The logging package allows you to assign a source and a type for each log message. The source specifies where the log message originated. The type is a category that can be used to route the log 

messages to specific output locations called log sinks. We have found the most useful log sink to be a text-based log file. The logging package can be configured for the types of messages to log. It can also be configured for how long to keep log files and how many to keep. This helps keep hard drives from getting too full.

I have fond memories as a kid spending Saturdays working on the family cars with my dad. We would dive in to taking things apart and putting them back together again. Whatever the problem was we could figure it out and fix it. With cars from the 1960s and 1970s, there wasn’t too much risk with this approach to car repair. Today, I still like to do my own car repairs when I can. But cars nowadays are far more complicated and compact. I have learned that I can’t just jump in and wing it with any hope of getting it done right or in a timely manner. My experience has taught me to rely on the experience of others, learn from their lessons and save myself from late nights asking, “what have I gotten myself into?”

Cimetrix CIM300^TM tool kit out of the box has already implemented a lot of the GEM 300 work for you. Notice I said “a lot” and not “all” of the work for you. To complete your GEM 300 application, your software will have to integrate with CIM300. The GEM 300 standards can be quite complex and some of the scenarios have intricate details. CIM300 provides a rich set of APIs and callbacks to help you implement a compliant GEM 300 solution. The key to success is knowing how to use the APIs and callbacks for the different GEM 300 scenarios.

The SEMI E87 Carrier Id Status state model, pictured below, is just one of many state models defined in the GEM 300 standards.

Figure 1 CARRIER ID STATUS STATE MODEL

There are several transitions in this state model and intricate conditions that determine which transition should be triggered. CIM300 supports this state model, but it requires interaction with your application to know which transition to make in the state model. In my experience, most people handle the happy path scenarios correctly, whether they're “winging it” or had formal training. However, I have rarely seen people handle the error scenarios correctly, without training on GEM 300 and CIM300. While understandable, error scenarios are often hard to follow and the implementation differences are subtle. The risk of doing it wrong in the software will execute the wrong transition in the state model, which in turn sends the incorrect event to the GEM host. The wrong event could really mess things up for the host. In both the happy path and error scenarios, the CIM300 API to call is the same:

CMSLib::CCxE87CMS::CarrierAtPort

However, how you specify the parameters to the call, it is different for each scenario. The differences in how you call the API will trigger different transitions in the state model. Our documentation for this one API call alone is longer than this entire blog post. That is how important it is to get it right. In addition to our product documentation, Cimetrix also provides CIM300 training and sample applications illustrating how to use our products.

I strongly recommend taking advantage of our CIM300 training. Training is the best first step to integrating CIM300 with your tool application. Training is typically a week long and provides an overview of the GEM 300 standards as well as hands-on experience using CIM300. The goal for Cimetrix in training is that by the end of the week-long training, clients have completed an implementation of a GEM 300 happy path scenario. That is, you receive hands-on experience using CIM300 to implement carrier verification (SEMI E87), creating and running a process job (SEMI E40) and control job (SEMI E94), tracking substrates (SEMI E90), and tracking equipment performance (SEMI E116).

Make sure you also leverage the sample applications that accompany CIM300. The sample applications provided with CIM300 give a jumpstart on integrating CIM300 with your own application. You can use the sample application as a reference for how to use our APIs and callbacks, copy/paste portions of the code into your own code, or use our application as a starting point for your own software. If you’re like me, you like having working source code you can refer to for concrete examples of how to do things and to see how things should work together.

If you dive right in and start implementing CIM300 without training or mentoring from an expert, you may find yourself spending a lot of late nights asking yourself, “what have I gotten myself into?” A little training goes a long way in simplifying the implementation!

Find out more about CIM300 or request a Technical Product Overview and/or Product Demo today!

Generally, when I do a DIY (do-it-yourself) project around the house, I spend the majority of the time searching for my tools. The other day I was helping a friend with a project. He had a well-organized tool box and it seemed that the perfect tool was always at his fingertips. I was amazed at how fast the project went and how easy it was when the right tools were handy.

In April of 2016, we published a blog called OEM EDA Implementation Best Practices that outlined ten things to consider when designing an equipment-side EDA / Interface A solution to fit your needs. This blog post analyzes a few of those recommendations and looks at how using the Cimetrix EDA products CIMPortal Plus, ECCE Plus and EDATester (a well-stocked and organized tool box) makes it very easy to follow those recommendations.

The basic steps in creating a useful EDA implementation are:

1. Determine which data will be published
2. Build an equipment model
3. Deploy the model
4. Publish the data from the equipment control application
5. Set up a data collection application
6. Test the interface

The blog post mentioned above states, “Since the content of the equipment metadata model is effectively the data collection contract between the equipment supplier and the factory users, your customer’s ultimate satisfaction with the EDA interface depends on the content and structure of this model.” Before building your model, you need to determine what data the equipment will make available for collection. CIMPortal Plus has the concept of a Data Collection Interface Module (DCIM) that publishes this data to the EDA server. The engineer building the model will map the data from the DCIM into the equipment model.

Once the mapping of the data is complete, the engineer will need to put this data in a format understood by the server. CIMPortal Plus provides a utility called Equipment Model Developer (EMDeveloper – pictured below) that makes it easy to create the hierarchy of your equipment (SEMI E120) and embed the data from the DCIM into that model (SEMI E125). If you use the tools and best practices provided in EMDeveloper, your equipment model will conform to the SEMI E164 (EDA Common Metadata) standard as well. This can be very useful when writing data collection applications so conformance to E164 is being required by more and more fabs. The E164 standard was developed to encourage companies using Interface A connections to provide a more common representation of equipment metadata based upon the SEMI E125 Specification for Equipment Self-Description. This makes data collection more uniform across these pieces of equipment.

Once the model is created and validated, it is deployed to the CIMPortal Plus server. The server is the component that manages and tracks all data collection plans, reports, tasks, access control and timing. 

With the DCIM information embedded in the model (described above), it is easy for the equipment control application to push the data to be published to the EDA server for collection. This is done by using a simple API available on the DCIM interface.

In addition to CIMPortal Plus server capabilities, Cimetrix has other products available to help with client-side data collection. ECCE Plus is an industry approved method for manually testing EDA implementations. For users who need to create client-side data collection applications, Cimetrix also provides EDAConnect - a powerful library that handles all the connection details and allows developers to concentrate on the specific data collection and analysis tasks.

Fabs receive a wide variety of equipment with EDA implementations from numerous vendors. They want to use a single verification application to make sure that all EDA implementations are compliant to the EDA standards. That’s where EDATester comes in. EDATester is a new product that allows users to quickly and accurately verify EDA standards compliance by automating the test procedures ISMI EDA Evaluation Method that were defined specifically for this purpose. If you use Cimetrix products to implement your EDA interface, you are guaranteed to be compliant with the SEMI EDA standards. But whether you use Cimetrix products to implement your EDA interface or not, you (and your fab customer) want to rest assured that your implementation is fully compliant. Moreover, you’ll want to know that you’ve met the fab’s performance criteria for your equipment interface. To support this use case, the EDATester also allows users to quickly profile the performance of EDA data collection on a piece of equipment so that fabs and those using the data will know the boundaries within which they can successfully collect equipment data.

With the well-stocked EDA tool box provided by Cimetrix, following the EDA best practices in creating an efficient, standards-compliant EDA interface becomes a snap.