Industry News, Trends and Technology, and Standards Updates

Next week, the world will once again gather at the industry’s leading trade fair for electronics development and production. The 2021 productronica and SEMICON Europa shows are open for in-person attendance and Cimetrix Incorporated will definitely be there. We hope to see many of you there as well!

The 2021 productronica show is co-located once again with SEMICON Europa in Munich, Germany from November 16-19 at the Messe München expo center. With safety protocols in place, Messe München is opening its doors to welcome the decision-makers and thought leaders from the industry to participate in showing new and innovative products and solutions spanning the entire value chain.

The Cimetrix booth will be in Productronica halls, where we will demonstrate our Smart Factory platform Cimetrix Sapience, to show how we can help with your smart manufacturing connectivity and application needs. Sapience, a cloud-native platform, features a distributed, scalable architecture for managing high-performance data pipelines from electronics equipment. As such, it is ideal for streaming analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence applications requiring data directly from the production equipment.

We are also highlighting an open position for a Munich-based Field Applications Engineer at the productronica career center and here on cimetrix.com.

We invite you to drop by our booth at productronica #437 in Hall A3, or you can make an appointment ahead of time by clicking the button below. We look forward to seeing you soon!

For the first time since the Fall of 2019, the SEMI North America Information & Control Committee (I&CC) was finally able to meet and conduct business online. Throughout all of 2020, the I&CC was not able to meet because SEMI regulations did not at that time allow voting in online meetings. Instead, only the task forces have been meeting. As a result, any passing ballots, unless super clean, had to wait for adjudication in the North America I&CC.

This year, prior to the I&CC meeting on April 1 and 2, all of the associated task forces also met as usual, including the GEM 300, Diagnostic Data Acquisition (DDA), and Advanced Backend Factory Integration (ABFI) task forces. Moreover, the I&CC was able to conduct all the unresolved business that had accumulated over the last year. During the committee meeting, the I&CC successfully used the SEMI Virtual Meeting (SVM) software which runs in an internet browser, allows each committee member to log in, and allows for official voting to take place during the meeting. The North America I&CC will meet again during the summer.

GEM 300 Task Force

In the GEM 300 task force, the primary activity was to officially redefine its charter and scope to match what it has already been doing for the last 20 years. Each SEMI task force defines a “Task Force Organization Force” document (aka TFOF) to establish its charter and scope. Somehow, the GEM 300 task force charter and scope were severely out of date.

In addition to this update, some changes to the E5 standard finally passed voting, pending some final approval. The E5 changes include several new messages and establish definitions for commonly used data collection terminology. The new messages complement the existing set of messages by allowing the host to query information about the current data collection setup. Currently, it is common for a host program to reset and redefine all data collection after first connecting to an equipment because there has been no way to query this information. With these new messages, the host will be able to query the setup and confirm that no data collection has changed while disconnected. Finally, it will be easier to test GEM interfaces with these new messages.

The task force already approved tasks to consider some major work to the GEM standard. The task force is also considering changes to the E116 standard, but there is some resistance to these changes. Here is a summary table of the GEM-related standards activity from across the globe.

DDA Task Force

In the Diagnostic Data Acquisition (DDA) task force (responsible for the EDA standards, aka Interface A), freeze 3 development is moving forward. All of the ballots still failed as expected. The number of remaining technical issues nevertheless has dwindled to just a handful. E132, E125, and especially E164 need the most work.

Following is a summary of the previously completed work.

And here is a summary of the work in progress.

All of the failed ballots will be reworked and resubmitted for voting. For many of these ballots, it will be the sixth time to go through the SEMI ballot procedure. Consensus is very nearly achieved, and the defects in the ballots have been identified and corrected. Additionally, there are plans to modify SEMI E179, the standard that defines how gRPC will be utilized. While testing EDA freeze 3, Cimetrix has identified two simple ways to modify the E179 protocol buffer files in order to reduce overhead. These and a few other changes will be proposed in a new ballot.

One of the last changes to the freeze 3 standards will be the introduction of passwords. In the current freeze 1 and freeze 2 versions, there are no passwords. Any client that knows a valid, unused Access Control List entry (ACL, the equivalent of a user name) can connect; therefore, there really isn’t any authentication unless using the SSL protocol with certificates. Passwords will enhance EDA security and facilitate EDA interface setup by allowing client applications to use the same ACL entry while defining a unique password to block other clients from using the same entry. The final E132 ballot will finalize the password feature.

The task force leaders are asking the voting members to raise any final issues before these ballots are submitted to SEMI to the next voting cycle so that we can approve these standards, give implementers a chance to experiment with EDA freeze 3, raise any serious issues that impede the implementation, and then propose the final changes which incorporate that feedback. Until a version of these standards is formally approved, it will be difficult to get concrete and widespread feedback on the new technology, which is a necessary precursor to its adoption and use.

ABFI Task Force

The Advanced Factory Integration task force passed more changes in E142 without controversy. The task force plans to create E142.4, another GEM implementation of E142, designed for larger wafer maps to allow for increased traceability possibilities. Additionally, the task force continues to make plans to develop an adoption matrix as a new standard to describe when GEM and GEM 300 standards should be adopted in backend equipment based on equipment features.

Read the pre-show blog of the SEMICON China 2021 show today. Read it now in Chinese or below in English.

SEMICON China 2021将于2021年3月17日至19日在上海新国际博览中心举办。矽美科公司将一如既往的参加，希望在展会上和你们相遇！

如果您也在此展会，欢迎您光临我们位于N3-3157号展位。我们将展出GEM和EDA/Interface A产品以及我们的智能工厂平台。

SEMICON China将我们和世界上发展最快、最具活力的微电子市场联系在一起，并为参展商提供了一个为中国最专业的人士展示我们的产品和技术的平台。

在我们为展会做准备的过程中，我们欢迎任何会议邀约，无论是在线的还是具体地点面对面的，请单击下面的按钮预约。如果您也参与展会，我们随时恭候您光临我们的展位。希望我们很快能见面！

SEMICON China 2021, an in-person, is taking place March 17-19, 2021 at the Shanghai New International Expo Center. Cimetrix Incorporated will be exhibiting and we hope to see many of you there!

If you are able to be at the exhibition during this time, we encourage you to visit Cimetrix Incorporated at booth N3 3157. We will be featuring our GEM and EDA/Interface A products as well as our Smart Factory Platform.

SEMICON China connects people in the world’s fastest growing and most dynamic microelectronics market and gives exhibitors the platform to showcase our products and technologies in front of the most qualified audience of industry professionals in China.

As we prepare for the show, we welcome any meeting requests, both virtual or in-person depending on location, by clicking the button below. Or if you are able to be in Shanghai during SEMICON, we look forward to you dropping by our booth at any time. We hope to meet with you soon!

SEMI Europa is sponsoring a new event – Technologies Unite Global Summit – and we are excited to announce that Cimetrix Incorporated will have a virtual booth at this online event on 15-19 February, 2021. 

Technologies Unite Global Summit brings together the global microelectronics supply chain, manufacturers, and the end users for this digital experience that spotlights digital transformation and microelectronics industry innovation and growth. This summit will feature eight forums presenting the latest innovations, as well as seven pavilions from around the world where exhibitors and attendees can connect with the global SEMI community.

After a year of cancelled and postponed in-person events, we are happy to participate in these virtual events that gives all of a us a chance to re-connect with our global communities. Be sure to register for and attend this brand new event and be sure to stop by our booth!

Thomas Simon, the General Manager of our Europe office will be available during booth hours to host discussions about all of our products, and particularly our Cimetrix Sapience^® Smart Factory Platform.

We hope to see you there. You can contact our team any time to schedule a demo or make an appointment by clicking the button below.

In December, 2020, Cimetrix Incorporated was honored as a Utah Top Workplace by the Salt Lake Tribune.

The Salt Lake Tribune partnered with Philadephia-based Energage to rank the Top Workplaces in Utah. Energage surveyed workers from over 1,300 Utah companies on a variety of topics to rate their workplace. Out of this pool, just 100 companies were selected as Utah Top Workplaces. Companies were then placed in categories by number of employees. Cimetrix was ranked 12^th out of the 45 finalist companies in the “small business category”.

At Cimetrix, we believe the key to a successful business is having a values based culture that focuses on ensuring our customer’s success and having everyone in alignment. Employees need to be doing a job they love, working on something they are passionate about and being rewarded for contributing to the company’s success.

We are honored that Cimetrix employees feel so passionate about the culture we’ve built that we were selected at a Utah Top Workplace for 2020.

While we were recently acquired and will now operate as the Cimetrix Connectivity Group within PDF Solutions, that doesn’t change our commitment to employees, culture and the core values that have made us successful. Employees drive our success and we look forward to a 2021 filled with new opportunities and potential.

SEMICON Japan 2020 is going virtual and we will be there! You can read about it now in Japanese or below in English.

今年のSEMICON JapanはCovid 19の世界的大流行の影響もあり、仮想環境での開催となりました。Cimetrix Incorporatedは12月14〜17日の4日間バーチャルブースに出展致しますので、皆様のご来訪を心よりお待ちしております。

日本では現在、半導体製造装置の3分の1と材料の半分以上を世界の半導体製造業界に供給しています。 世界がよりスマートになるにつれて、革新的なソリューションとテクノロジーがこのような大きな展示会で紹介され続けています。

Cimetrixは、GEM機器の接続と制御、およびEDA /interfaceA活用して装置データの収集、提供を行う事が出来ます。

Cimetrix Sapienceは、単一のイベント駆動型フレームワーク内でさまざまな工場設備をシームレスに接続するスマートファクトリープラットフォームです。 Sapienceプラットフォームにより、工場のITシステムは工場の機器に直接アクセスでき、その結果として生じる機器の通信、データ収集、およびプロセス制御により、インダストリー4.0、ビッグデータ、およびスマートファクトリーのイニシアチブの基盤が確立されます。

もし別途ご相談いただければ、デモンストレーションを行う事も出来ますので、お気軽にご連絡ください。

それでは2020年の最後のSEMICONショーにて皆様に会える事を心から楽しみにしています。

After Cancelling the show several months ago in Tokyo, due in part to the Covid 19 world-wide pandemic, SEMICON Japan reconsidered and decided to go forward with the Exposition in a virtual environment. Cimetrix Incorporated (now a part of PDF Solutions) is proud and excited to be participating with a virtual booth on the 14-17 of December and we hope to see many of you there!

Japan supplies one third of the equipment and more than half of all materials to the global semiconductor manufacturing industry. As the world gets smarter, innovative solutions and technologies continue to be introduced at big shows like this.

We will be able to schedule demos of our GEM equipment connectivity and control software solutions, as well as our EDA/Interface A products.

The Cimetrix Sapience platform will also be available for a demonstration by visiting our virtual booth to make an appointment with our team. Sapience is the Smart Factory Platform that seamlessly connects varying factory equipment within a single event-driven framework. The Sapience platform allows factory IT systems direct access to factory equipment, and the resulting equipment communication, data collection and process control establishes the foundation for Industry 4.0, Big Data and Smart Factory initiatives.

We encourage you to join the Cimetrix Japan team at our virtual booth at this last SEMICON show of 2020. We hope everyone is staying safe and healthy, and hope to see you soon!

To schedule a demo prior to the show, click the button below.

Acquisition Provides Potential of Unrivaled Intelligence for Semiconductor, Packaging, and Electronics Manufacturing

PDF Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ: PDFS) today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Cimetrix Incorporated. The combination of Cimetrix^® connectivity products and platforms with PDF Solutions’ Exensio^® analytics platform powered by machine learning, is intended to enable IC, assembly, and electronics manufacturer customers to extract more intelligence – not just data – from their factory floor, to build more reliable ICs and systems at lower manufacturing costs.

“Cimetrix is excited to join the PDF Solutions team. Our two companies share the vision and commitment to provide a smart manufacturing platform that seamlessly connects high quality data from the factory floor to cloud based analytics platforms,” said Bob Reback, Chairman, President, and CEO at Cimetrix. “We believe this combination will provide tremendous opportunities for Cimetrix customers to benefit from the cloud, AI/ML, and analytics capabilities from PDF Solutions, and PDF customers will benefit from higher quality data originating from the factory floor using Cimetrix’s connectivity products and platforms.”

To read more, please view press release here.

Background and Audience

Over the past several years, I have written numerous blog postings heralding the benefits of the SEMI Equipment Data Acquisition (EDA, also known as Interface A) standards, promoting their adoption by 300mm wafer fabs around the world, explaining how to develop robust purchase specs to ensure the interfaces delivered by the equipment suppliers meet the fab customers’ expectations, describing how the various components of the standards work together and the importance of the embedded equipment model, and finally explaining how to run compliance and performance tests on an EDA interface to validate its fitness for production use. The target audience for most of these postings has been the factory users, for they are the ones who increasingly depend on detailed equipment and process data to profitably run their enterprises.

By contrast, this posting is aimed at the equipment suppliers who are looking to increase the value of their product families by augmenting their hardware offerings with software capabilities that only they are uniquely qualified to provide.

This is not a new idea. Several major equipment suppliers have offered so-called “Equipment Engineering Systems (EES)” products as companions for their equipment over the years, providing applications like Fault Detection and Classification (FDC), production monitoring, maintenance management, local repositories for diagnostics and field support, and other capabilities that leveraged deep domain knowledge of the equipment. However, these systems necessarily relied on private interfaces to the equipment for their data, such as an additional network connection, direct access to the file system, or other mechanisms. And from the fab’s perspective, these constituted yet another piece of infrastructure to maintain.

Now there’s EDA: a key enabler for value-added equipment applications

Since the SEMI EDA standards are inherently multi-client, a single EDA interface can support not only the factory information and control systems that depend on equipment data, it can also provide whatever information a supplier-specific application may need as long this data is represented in the equipment metadata model. Since that model is designed by the equipment suppliers as a fundamental component of the EDA interface, they can choose to put as much information in these model as they want, possibly well beyond that required by the fab customers’ purchase specifications. In fact, these models could be used to implement the diagnostic logging capability that suppliers usually build into their equipment for their own use, but without requiring custom software to read and interpret that information. See the figure below for an example of such a configuration.

The EDA standards also include a provision for “built-in DCPs” (DCP = Data Collection Plan) which can be shipped with the equipment and protected from accidental deletion at the factory site. These DCPs could be crafted by the equipment supplier to directly feed whatever value-added applications the supplier chose to develop, whether these resided on a computer local to the equipment in the fab, on portable computers used by field service engineers to diagnose problems, or on remote cloud-based systems allowed to connect via secure EDA-defined URLs. This flexibility opens up a wide range of application types, from those that embed equipment-specific algorithms to generic Machine Learning frameworks… the possibilities are endless.

What all these approaches have in common is a standard EDA client capability that can establish a session with the equipment, activate Data Collection Plans, and receive the ensuing Data Reports. The EDAConnecter within the Cimetrix Sapience platform provides all these features and more in a lightweight set of .NET libraries which can be deployed wherever they are needed to consume EDA data.

Conclusion

More and more semiconductor factories are requiring EDA interfaces with their new equipment purchases with highly prescribed equipment models and demanding performance criteria. From the equipment supplier’s perspective, these requirements have been viewed as a source of additional cost, with all the benefits accruing to the factory customers. But it doesn’t have to be that way…

Why not take advantage of this interface to offer additional value using a standards-based approach? This just might be an idea whose time has finally come. If you agree, give us a call – we can help you make it happen!

Meet Richard Andrew, CCF Services Software Engineer at Cimetrix. Read on to learn a little bit more about Richard.

How long have you worked at Cimetrix?

I have been working at Cimetrix for just over two years now.

When did you graduate and what degree did you get?

I graduated from Utah Valley University with a Bachelor's of Science in Computer Science.

What drew you to Cimetrix originally?

I wanted to work on fun tools and equipment, and get to control robots!

What is your role at Cimetrix currently?

I am a Software Engineer on the CCF (CIMControlFramework) Services Team.

What do you think it means to a client to have a great CCF services team?

Having a great CCF services team means clients can either have Cimetrix do part or all of a project  and trust that it will accomplish what they need and they won’t have to worry about it. We value being able to give our clients peace of mind.

What do you like best about the work you do at Cimetrix?

I like the fulfillment I get when our customers are happy with our software and the work we do on our Services team.

What is something you’ve learned while working at Cimetrix?

I’ve learned how to be a better developer and how to work on various projects to accomplish unique goals. I’ve learned how to talk with clients, understand their needs and train them on how to best utilize our software.

What is one of the hardest challenges you’ve been faced with at Cimetrix and how did you overcome the challenge?

Becoming Microsoft certified required a lot of dedication and effort both in the office and outside.  It was like going to school full time and working full time at the same time.  I overcame it through dedicated studying, spending the time required, and taking lots of practice tests!

What is your favorite vacation spot?

I like to go fishing up in Alaska.

What do you like to do in your free time?

I like to play softball, play games, and spend times outdoors.

We are once again gearing up for a virtual show next week! SMTA International is going to be held virtually 28-30 September, 2020. We are excited to be exhibiting at this show for the first time! SMTA International (or Surface Mount Technology Association International) was established in 1984 and is a non-profit international association of companies and individuals involved in all aspects of the electronics industry. The association brings together a professional network of process engineers, executives, project managers, designers and technologists who are shaping the future of the electronics assembly industry.

For the first virtual SMTAi Conference, anyone can register for a free expo pass that also includes the Live Electronics Expo, (Mon-Wed 9/28 – 9/30), the Student and Young Professionals Program (Tues PM 9/29), the Women’s Leadership Program (Wed PM 9/20) and much more.

Cimetrix will have a virtual booth that will me manned by product experts throughout the 3-day expo. We will have live demo times available by reservation (you can sign up now or during the show!). We will also have videos and documentation that features our products and services.

Cimetrix Sapience® will be showcased at SMTAi. Sapience is a smart factory platform to seamlessly connect varying factory equipment within a single event-driven framework. The Sapience platform provides rapid-deployment tools for factories to mine the treasure trove of data available from shop floor equipment, driving actionable insights for optimal decision-making.

We would love to “see” you at the virtual SMTAi Conference next week! Be sure to stop by our booth and talk to us! There will be private chat and voice/video conferencing available from 9:30 am – 4:30 pm CT during the expo and we’d love to meet up and talk about your needs!