Industry News, Trends and Technology, and Standards Updates

How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time. 

In a March 2016 blog post entitled CIMControlFramework Work Breakdown, Cimetrix listed eleven points to be taken into consideration when starting an equipment control application using CIMControlFramework (CCF). One of the things to consider is how you want to control the material moving through the tool – or scheduling of material. This blog post delves a little deeper into the scheduling aspect of equipment control applications.

Doctoral dissertations and entire books have been written to discuss scheduler theory. Because of sheer volume of information available regarding scheduling and scheduling theory, the topic can come across as a little (or a lot) intimidating. CCF aims to take the scare factor out of scheduling and allow equipment control application developers to fully control the movement of material through their tool.

CCF provides a framework for a reactive, rule-based scheduler. You, as the application developer and in conjunction with your customer needs, get to decide what decisions are important when creating your scheduler. One of the first things you need to do when developing a scheduler is to ask questions to help you determine the rules for scheduling. Some questions you may ask:

• What is the most important thing I am attempting to accomplish with my scheduler?

  • Is throughput the most important?

  • Is path predictability most important?

• How can I ensure that when I pick material up that there is a destination available to put it?

• If two components need a robot to take action (pick up or place material), which action takes precedence?

• Do the process chambers need to be prepared before receiving material to process?

• What is the wafer flow scenario (is there a specific order that material must follow)?

  • Does the material need to be aligned before processing?

  • Does the material need to be acclimatized before processing?

  • Does the material need to be cooled before returning to the carrier?

• Are there any maintenance tasks that have to be performed periodically in the tool that have to be accounted for in scheduling?

This is by no means an exhaustive list of questions, but these are the types of questions that need to be answered when creating your scheduler. 

The scheduling framework provided by CCF allows you to translate these rules into C# conditional statements. No proprietary scripting languages need to be learned. No specific configuration training is required. C# developers can use industry standard IDEs to put these rules into scheduling practice.

Once the scheduling rules are determined, it can still be intimidating to know how to start creating your scheduler. Cimetrix provides a few basic, as well as more advanced,of  scheduling labs that fully explain how to translate your rules into a functional scheduler. These labs can be completed in as little as a few hours. The labs explain the scheduling theory used by Cimetrix and allow users to create functional schedulers in a short amount of time. Many CCF users can create a working scheduler in one week.

Cimetrix also provides complete working examples of atmospheric and vacuum schedulers as part of CCF. Another lab provided by Cimetrix clearly describes how to start with one of these working schedulers and modify it to suit your scheduling needs.

The CCF scheduling framework allows the software to be hardware agnostic. In other words, it is not tightly coupled to device drivers. This allows tool manufacturers to change out hardware without having to make scheduler changes to support the new hardware.

Although scheduling may seem like an intimidating whale to eat, CCF helps break the tasks down into bite-sized chunks.

To learn more about CCF, visit the CIMControlFramework page on our website!

In 1976, Blue Oyster Cult released their hit song, “Don’t Fear the Reaper”.  In 2000, Saturday Night Live produced a fictitious, but humorous skit around the production of the “Don’t Fear the Reaper” called, “More Cowbell”.  The “More Cowbell” skit put a very light hearted spin on the production of the hit song.   After seeing that skit, I can never hear that song the same way. The cowbell, for as small a piece it plays, is a huge part of the song.

The same can be said for the hardware that is used in Semiconductor manufacturing tools.  Tool control boils down to controlling the hardware. Without controlling the hardware, the UI and factory automation will not amount to much if the robot doesn’t move. Everything from the robot, down to a simple presence sensor on a load port is needed. What may seem to be the simplest device can be the most prominent.  Each device plays an important part in the process. 

A Cimetrix blog post on March 15, 2016 entitled CIMControlFramework Work Breakdown, identifies driver integration as one of the first steps that needs to be done in the work breakdown for a CIMControlFramework (CCF) application. It may seem intimidating to create a driver to control hardware. There is the need to connect to the device. There is some number of commands and possible responses to deal with.  It can be overwhelming, but can be conquered by understanding what needs to be done to control a device through a driver.

Let’s look at how to go about developing a driver.

1. Understand the interface to the device using any and all documentation available.  The documentation will provide information on how to send commands and interpret the responses.
   1. Does the device control only one device or many?
   2. What is the communication protocol to the device?
      1. TCP/IP
      2. Serial ports
   3. What are the commands?  How are the commands composed?
   4. What are the responses?
   5. Will the device need to be polled?
   6. Will the device send unsolicited messages? 
2. Understand what needs to be controlled on the device for the tool. 
   1. Will you only need to use a subset of the interface or the entirety of the interface?  If just a subset, then there is only a need to write those initially.
3. Writing code to “talk” to the device
   1. Do you have a simulator for the device?
      This one is important, especially if the hardware has limited availability.  If needed, a simple simulator can be developed to at least validate communications, then expanded over time to simulate faults or other conditions.
      
      As the tool begins to come together, each simulator will become invaluable when developing the other parts of the tool and coordinating the devices together. 
   2. Unit tests can be useful to verify that the driver behaves as expected before using on actual hardware.  Unit tests can also provide regression testing should changes be made to a driver.
      Some areas to consider unit testing;
      
      1. Handling of failure to connect
      2. Handling of failure to send to the device or receive from the device
      3. Handling of return values
   3. Start out simple, just get a connection to the device to begin with.  Next send a simple command and inspect the response.  Create a success and build upon the successes!

In the end, a driver will be sending commands and getting and interpreting a response. For every device you create a driver for you’ll also become the expert on that device.

Even though it can be intimidating to start, developing drivers is one of the fun parts of tool development. There is nothing more exciting than seeing the hardware begin to dance in the fashion that has been choreographed in your software

CCF provides utilities and examples to help create drivers for your hardware and easily integrate them into the application, to assist you to orchestrate and provide more cowbell in your tool control. 

To learn more about CCF, visit the CIMControlFramework page on our website!

Almost everyone I know that has built a house has given me a list of things they would “do differently next time,” but a lot of those same people would also say that they would never build again. So does that mean everything they learned through the process is lost? Is it possible to get it right the first time? Maybe not, but there are a lot of things you can do to learn from the experience of others. For example, you can buy house plans that have been used before and are designed to leverage standard components. Rather than designing and building everything from scratch, you can use pre-built sub systems like fabricated floor joists and manufactured roof trusses. Using proven components saves a lot of time and worry about whether or not they will work properly and as expected. This allows you to focus on the customizations that will make the home meet your unique needs.

Implementing an equipment control application is a lot like building a house. You can design and build a complete control system from the bottom up—building all the components necessary to handle communication with the hardware, display information to the operators, manage user access, log relevant event and data information—but it doesn’t add value to the core competency of your equipment. The best option is to leverage proven design that has been built through multiple prior applications and leverages those lessons learned along the way.

Cimetrix's CIMControlFramework provides all the standard components necessary to build an equipment control application. With working samples for both atmospheric and vacuum equipment, it can easily be customized and extended as needed to meet specific control needs.

There is an old saying that goes, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”

If you would like to learn more about CIMControlFramework and how it can help you on your next project, give us a call or feel free to contact us here.♦

Have you ever watched one of those cooking shows where the chef spends a lot of time whipping up the ingredients to some elaborate dish, and, when it comes time to put the dish in the oven to bake, there is already a finished one in there? If only the real world worked that way. Sometimes it would be nice to be able to go to the oven and have a delicious meal already waiting for you.

The Cimetrix CIMControlFramework™ (CCF) product is unique among Cimetrix products in that it not only provides source code, but also combines several other Cimetrix products (CIMConnect™, CIM300™, and CIMPortal™ Plus) and takes full advantage of all the features provided by each product.

One of the features of CIMPortal Plus that is used in CCF is the concept of an equipment model. The equipment model describes the data that your equipment provides through Interface A. The tool hierarchy is modeled along with all of the parameters, events, and exceptions published by the tool. It used to be that CCF users had to manually create the tool hierarchy in their base equipment model. CCF would then populate the model with the parameters, events, and exceptions. If the tool hierarchy changed, the base model would have to be modified. It made changing the tool configuration much more difficult.

Starting with the CCF 4.0 release, a base equipment model that is common to all equipment was installed. Generally, CCF users will not need to modify the base model. CCF takes advantage of the modeling API provided by CIMPortal Plus to dynamically add hierarchy nodes to the base model depending on the components that are created in CCF. This new feature makes it easy to change the configuration of the CCF tool because the user does not have to make modifications to the base model and redeploy the package to be able to run CCF.

The dynamically created model is also compliant with the SEMI E164 Common Metadata standard. This compliance is possible because of the dynamic nature of model creation. The required elements of E164 are added to the equipment model dynamically during the startup of Tool Supervisor.

Having a dynamically created Interface A model that exactly matches your equipment structure and is guaranteed to be E164-compliant without having to do any extra work is similar to going to the oven and finding a delicious dish already cooked and waiting for you.♦

To learn more about CCF, visit the CIMControlFramework page on our website!

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

“Watch out for that first step Mac, it’s a lulu!” – Bugs Bunny

These quotes by the great philosophers Lau Tzu and Bugs Bunny have more in common than would appear at first glance. At the beginning of a journey you have the element of the unknown. There is excitement that it could be a great journey, but there is also an element of the unknown that may make that first step the hardest to take. If you haven’t put in the preparation for a successful journey, that first step might be a lulu.

Similarly, when starting a new equipment control application, there is excitement for the great end product, but also some element of not knowing the best place to start. CIMControlFrameowrk (CCF) offers a great training program to get you started and many building blocks for helping create a first-class equipment control application. Even with these great starting tools, many users still have the question, “Where do I go from here?”

The first step is to create a work breakdown of what it takes to create a successful equipment control application. There will obviously be tasks that are unique to each equipment control application, but most applications have some common tasks or epic user stories that have to be completed during the project. The order in which these stories are completed may depend on milestones and expectations for when they are accomplished, but they generally all need to be completed during the project.

• Integrate Devices – CCF provides an Equipment layer with abstractions of most commonly used devices. Integrating these devices into CCF only requires the implementation of the abstract interface.

• Material Movement Through the Tool – CCF provides a flexible scheduler with complete working examples of different types of scheduling that could be done.

• Implement the Process Module – CCF provides a process module interface that allows the rest of CCF to communicate with your process module – your secret sauce.

• Create an Operator Interface (OI) – CCF provides an OI framework that allows commands to be sent and updates to be made. It also provides some default screens that use this interface. It also allows for insertion and use of custom OI screens.

• Simulation – CCF provides a simulator that can be used in place of real hardware. The simulator can be used to deliver/remove material, perform robot moves, and do simulated IO. This is invaluable in continuing development before the hardware is ready or if there is limited tool time for the developers.

• Recipes (Process Recipes and Execution) – CCF provides a recipe manager for passing recipes through the tool. The default recipe can be used or custom recipes can be added.

• I/O – CCF provides ASCII serial drivers and other common IO providers. Custom IO providers can also be included in CCF.

• Data Collection and Storage – Knowing what data to store and what medium to use for storage is recommended up front.

• Factory Automation – CCF provides a fully integrated GEM, GEM300, and EDA implementation.

• Diagnostics and Testing – The CCF logging package is a fantastic tool for debugging your application both on the tool and remotely.

• Errors and Recovery – CCF provides an Alarms package for signaling of and recovery from error conditions.

By going through CCF training and creating a work breakdown of the tasks that need to be done for your equipment control application, you can ensure that your first step will be the foundation of a successful journey.♦

To learn more about CCF, visit the CIMControlFramework page on our website!

Every company that needs software must make a build versus buy decision at some point. Some choices are easy—it makes little sense to build your own office software for word processing, spreadsheets, or presentations. But what if you need software to control specialized physical equipment?

Classic advantages of building your own software are:

• Canned software is generally targeted to meet many needs for most problems. Custom software is better suited to meet specific and uncommon needs.

• Canned software has a fixed set of features and it may be difficult to add or remove specific features, which may lead to software that contains unneeded features or is missing features that you do need. Custom software can be built to meet the specifications of a projects and include all the features that are needed and never any that aren’t.

• The process of developing software builds in-house technical expertise. This expertise can be used to create competitive advantage through higher performance and faster reaction time in meeting the changing needs of the marketplace.

Classic advantages of using standardized software are:

• Standardized software is generally less expensive than custom software because its cost can be spread across many customers and/or tools.

• Standardized software can require less time depending on the degree of customization required.

• Standardized software can be more reliable since it has been tested and used in many different applications.

• Standardized software may provide more features than would otherwise be available.

Why Not Combine the Best of Both Options?

Buying a tool control framework can help you build your own tool control software and still get the benefits of using standardized software. The framework can take care of common problems while you focus on items unique to your specific tool. As a framework, features can be removed, replaced, or even modified as needed. You reduce your costs as well as your time-to-market by using a selection of reliable, field-proven features and including only those that are relevant and add value to your control system. You still retain and build your in-house technical expertise to create competitive advantages in controlling your equipment instead of treating tool control expertise as a commodity.

Using a tool control framework can be a smart way to improve your processes by using standardized software that is easy to customize. So why not consider it as an option for your next project?

If you are interested in downloading the data sheet on Cimetrix’ tool control framework software, CIMControlFramework, click here.♦