Industry News, Trends and Technology, and Standards Updates

Background

The SEMI North America, the Information & Control Committee meets three times per year, but this year the schedule is changed due to the SEMICON West semiannual relocation to Phoenix beginning this year. SEMI held winter meetings in North America on February 24-26 at SEMI headquarters in Milpitas, CA. Like usual, meetings are hybrid where attendees can join in person or remotely. The meetings include task forces with leaders from Cimetrix on the GEM 300, ABFI (Advanced Backend Factory Integration), GUI, and DDA task forces as well as the committee meeting on Wednesday. This is a summary of what happened in the task forces including GEM 300, ABFI and DDA and other task force activities. There were few ballots this last cycle, but I will also include updates from the Fall meetings in 2024 since I did not create a blog for those meetings.

Note that all ballots that pass in the committee are still subject to a final review by the global SEMI Audit & Review committee, where a ballot technically can still fail when proper SEMI procedures and regulations are not strictly followed. This is rare in the North America Information & Control Committee but can happen.

I also wish to note that SEMI publishes a website with all global committee information where anyone can peruse the extensive details. It is at this website: https://www.semi.org/en/products-services/standards/developing-technical-standards.

GEM300 Task Force

The most recent changes to the GEM and GEM 300 standards include the addition of ‘well-known’ names for all required collection events, alarms, data variables, status variables and equipment constants within each standard. Recent ballots are related to fixing a few errors in these new tables and updates based on other ballots. This work is finally done for the core standards. Next step in this long process is to update the EDA (Interface A) E164 standard and new subordinate standard to require use of these well-knowns and also to update the SEMI E172 SEDD standard to require use of the well-known names in equipment SEDD files. This has taken a couple years to develop, but ultimately will be extremely useful to quickly map host software applications to implementations, both for EDA and GEM interfaces, and to identify GEM data in EDA implementations. Quicker mapping means quicker equipment integration at the factory.

Last fall, the GEM 300 task force passed some minor updates to the E90 substrate tracking standard in ballot 7278. This includes adding a couple new variables related to the substrate attributes not previously called out specifically yet were added more for completeness than usefulness. This winter, another E90 ballot 7316 passed that corrected a long existing spelling inconsistency for variables between E90 and E90.1. This should not affect implementations, yet some implementers may wish to rename a couple of variables in their implementations to match the standard.

Last fall, the GEM 300 task force made similar changes to the E87 carrier management standard in ballot 7279. In addition to adding a few new well-knowns mapping to additional port and carrier attributes, the well-known names for alarms now support port specific alarms. Well-known names were added for the Carrier Complete Prediction state model, recently updated in 2024 with significant changes. Finally, the carrier’s substrate count attribute format was modified from a limiting 1-byte to allowing 4-byte implementations. This is an important improvement for the semiconductor backend industry where there can be hundreds of substrates on a carrier, unlike semiconductor front end where the substrates are typically wafers and limited to 25.

This winter an E157 Module Process Tracking ballot finally passed in its third attempt. This ballot significantly enhanced to support equipment that don’t have a process chamber. The current published standard focuses on reporting recipe execution in a process module, where all the material in the chamber is processed simultaneously. Most importantly, the standard enables reporting when each step in the recipe begins and completes. Many equipment in especially outside of semiconductor front-end don’t have a process module and instead have continuous flow operation. The enhancements to E157 enable reporting the recipe execution on a specific substrate, including when each step begins and completes. This is another example how GEM related standards are adopting to the needs of backend equipment.

Ballot 7312 replaced ballots 7275 and 7276 from the 2024 fall meetings to implement well-known names in SEMI E5, the SECS-II standard. The task force decided to rename E30 well-known names that originate in SEMI E5 with an ‘E5’ prefix instead of ‘E30’. This passed ballot completes the current plans to develop these well-known names in the GEM related standards.

DDA Task Force

Last fall, the DDA task force pass just one ballot. Ballot 7288 resolved a few issues raised by task force members and an update the .proto files to align with the current Protocol Buffers Style Guide. By conforming to the Protocol Buffers Style Guide, gRPC code generators can better adapt to language specific styles.

After the DDA task force met last fall, a group of companies volunteered to test the data collection features using the proposed gRPC interface definitions and updated E134 standard. Previous test sessions had already validated E132 Session Management and E125 Equipment Modeling. A test plan was created and previously distributed to the participants. Attendees alternated connecting with each other’s software as clients and servers and then collecting data. Five companies participated. Twenty-eight issues were submitted of varying severity. Based on this feedback, the DDA task force created ballot 7321 to correct known issues. Since then a few more issues have been reported. The task force ballot failed one of the ballot line items and will resubmit with corrections and a few additional changes for voting in the upcoming cycle. If all goes well, the changes in ballot 7321A will become the core of the EDA Freeze 3 standard. We can hope!

The DDA Task Force is also actively developing a ballot to update SEMI standard E164 which establishes EDA equipment modeling guidelines. New subordinate standards will map GEM 300 standards to a specific EDA freeze 3 implementation based on the well-known items recently defined in the GEM 300 standards and based on the updated primary standard E164 guidelines. This is the final piece to establishing a complete EDA Freeze 3 standard. Client and equipment server implementers can develop software before E164 is finalized.

ABFI (Advanced Backend Factory Integration) Task Force

No ballots were adjudicated in the ABFI task force. Instead, the task force continued several open discussions. We discussed how a ballot from last year was published as a new standard SEMI E192 Guide for Equipment Adoption Criteria for GEM and GEM-Related Standards. The guide was just published in January 2025 and aims to provide a high-level overview and organization of the 40+ GEM related standards and the GEM related 30+ subordinate standards. The guide is meant to introduce the many GEM related standards for newcomers and experts alike. Since the guide was written and now published, several developments have occurred which require the guide to be updated.

• The Computer and Device Security task force in the Information & Control Committee developed a new GEM-related standard, E191.
• The GEM 300 task force expanded the scope for E157 including a title change.
• The Equipment Data Publication task force in the Information & Control Committee developed a new GEM-related standard, E190.

A new ballot was approved to update the SEMI E192 guide with these latest changes.

Additionally, the ABFI task force is planning to update the SEMI E142 substrate map specification to include standardized XY coordinate system mapping.

CDS (Computer & Device Security) Task Force

The CDS task force is actively updated SEMI standard E191, the Specification for Computing Device Cybersecurity Status Reporting. This new standard defines standard status variables on a GEM interface regarding the operating system for each computer in the equipment, such as the name, version and build of the operating system. This enables factories to track the operating systems on the computers and compare this with any known vulnerabilities and request equipment computer patches and upgraded. The standard will be updated to provide more information, although the additional data is not yet completely decided.

Information & Control Committee

A new order of business was introduced in the Information & Control Committee by representatives from the Physical Interfaces and Carriers committee. Our two committees share control of the SEMI standard E84 the Specification for Enhanced Carrier Handoff Parallel I/O interface. Some users are interested in developing a new TCP/IP based protocol be introduced to replace the parallel I/O interface. The discussions are preliminary just seeking interested parties at this time.

To learn more about the SEMI standards, the committees or just to speak with an expert please click the button below. 

This blog explains an approach that Cimetrix CIMControlFramework^TM (CCF) developers can use to customize CCF for load ports without any carrier ID readers.

When implementing a loadport, you may implement a derived loadport by inheriting the LoadPort class that includes the Carrier ID reader from CCF.

If the Carrier ID reader is unavailable, you will then need to try modifying the derived loadport in several situations.

Among them:

• When the loadport does not physically have any Carrier ID Readers.
• When a Carrier ID Reader is temporarily unavailable.

However, CCF provides a cool configuration parameter to address these challenges without changing the source code.

The rest of this posting briefly shows you how to accomplish this, and how to disable Carrier ID Reader.

How to disable the Carrier ID reader

When the Supervisor is not running, open the configuration file ‘Runtime\Configuration\Config.cfge’ by double-clicking on the file. Please make sure that Supervisor is not running before you move forward to the following because the Dynamic property of the configuration parameter is false.

If the configuration file is not opened automatically with CCF Configuration Editor, run ‘CCF\Bin\Cimetrix.ConfigurationEditor.exe’ and select the configuration file by clicking ‘File - Open’ on the top menu.

Go to the ‘LP1IDReaderAvailable” parameter in ‘FactoryAutomation – LoadPorts’ on the left tree panel. This parameter is for LoadPort 1. So, if you would change the parameter for LoadPort 2, go to ‘LP2IDReaderAvailable’.

Go to the ‘Value’ item in the right property panel and change the value from True to False. Then save the configuration file. Additionally, please apply the same value to the decrypted file ‘ConfigDecrypted.cfgx’.

This change will disable the Carrier ID Reader in the Load Port without changing any source code. Therefore, your derived Load Port can operate without a Carrier ID reader.

How to test it

Then run Supervisor and Operator Interface.

After that, you can enter a Carrier ID yourself manually on the Operator Interface when loading a carrier.

In Summary

• You can disable a Carrier ID reader by changing the configuration parameter ‘LPxIDReaderAvailable’ for Load Port x without changing any source code.
• You can enter a Carrier ID value yourself on the OperatorInterface.

All are helpful solutions for CCF developers who need to implement Load Port without Carrier ID Reader.

To learn more about this solution and other CCF programming best practices, please schedule a time to talk with a Cimetrix representative.

Today I would like to give an update on SEMI Standards activities in Korea. 

Though it began in 2024, our group does not have an official name yet; for the time being, we simply call it the “Autonomous Fab Working Group.”

As you can infer from the name, the goal is to establish a SEMI standard for the Autonomous Fab. Though this may represent a challenge for some of the major semiconductor manufacturers, given their presence in the global market, it is natural that these companies, like Samsung and SK hynix would need to have a vital role in this initiative.

A little history is appropriate at this point. This activity first began with a forum meeting during SEMICON Korea 2024 last February. Samsung’s executive vice president held a keynote session as a part of the SEMICON Korea conference, and it ignited the participants’ imaginations to suggest ideas for a new SEMI standard. After SEMICON, SEMI Korea organized a follow-on meetings to further develop these ideas. Several meetings were held, and we agreed on the main themes and specific focus areas for a number of sub-groups.

I joined as a representative of PDF Solutions, Cimetrix Prdoucts. Samsung and SK hynix sent 5-7 engineers each. Other Korean equipment suppliers and software companies, such as Miracom, Wonik, Global Zeus, Doople, and BISTel, joined as well.

The following summary of a recent meeting provides additional insight into this effort:

• Working title: Autonomous Fab Working Group
• Purpose: Develop Autonomous Fab standard to achieve better competence and innovation, maximize the efficiency and quality of semiconductor manufacturing processes
• Related activities
  • Standardization and authentication of Autonomous Fab technology
  • Sharing information for cooperation
  • Establishing active relationships between industry and academia
  • Prediction and response of future technologies
  • Developing an educational program to train new industry people

We plan to have another meeting in July to elect a co-chair for the main working group and fill the other leadership positions.

As many know, Samsung and SK hynix are big influencers for this activity. Sharing technology and ideas can be difficult because of sensitivities. However, with SEMI’s guidance, we believe we can achieve a useful level of consensus for a new standard in the near future.

The six steps for the first approach are:

1. Share common points and goals
2. Choose main themes
3. Derive subitems from #2
4. Set priorities
5. Perform steps for standardization
6. Complete subitems

With this guidance, our first decision was to set up two internal subgroups and assign each their area of work.
Briefly, one is for hardware and one for software. The two groups and subjects are,

1. PM Automation sub-group: Factory footprint & area, Transfer robots, safety, etc.
2. Data & Traceability sub-group: Automated data handling, version management, security, etc.

In addition to the above, all the members agreed that if we have more hardware companies join, such as robot, EFEM etc., it will be an abundant discussion, therefore, SEMI will invite these companies to join at the next meeting.

It has been great to see all of these companies come together and work toward the same goal.

Our next meeting will be on July 17^th (KST). We hope to see everyone there!

Earlier this quarter (16-18 April 2024) Alan Weber and Jon Holt were privileged to deliver the 3-hour tutorial that always precedes the opening session of the annual European Advanced Process Control and Manufacturing (APC|M) Conference. This year’s conference was held in Hamburg, Germany and again co-located with the Smart Systems Integration (SSI) Conference and attracted more than 200 participants across the industry and around the globe.

In a slight break with tradition, rather than diving deeply into one or two APC-specific technologies, Alan and Jon took a broader perspective, covering a wide range of topics that are germane to production implementations of APC and related advanced manufacturing applications. The rationale for this approach is that APC can no longer be considered a standalone suite of applications, but an integral part of an increasingly complex factory information and control system. As a result, APC practitioners should have at least a working knowledge of these necessary complementary technologies.

Against this backdrop, the theme of the tutorial was “Smart Manufacturing System Engineering for Semiconductor Factories;” the target audience included APC and smart manufacturing application developers, system engineers, and managers; and the only prerequisites were a keen interest in improving semiconductor manufacturing capability and control and a desire to understand the broader context of APC.

The session covered a broad range of topics at limited depth to give participants an understanding of how APC and other smart manufacturing applications work together in a production environment. It identified shared requirements such as data sources, standards, implementation technologies, and other system architectural elements that offer a unified perspective on this overall domain. Finally, it listed sources of information for those wanting to explore these topics in more depth.

We were fortunate to have about 120 participants in the tutorial and received positive feedback about the choice of topics and quality of the material. Alan and Jon “tag teamed” the topics shown on the agenda slide below and could have continued for another couple of hours given the attendees’ level of interest. 

A number of participants were especially appreciative of the industry history section, which emphasized how relatively young the semiconductor manufacturing industry is, and how rapidly it has evolved through global collaboration on the development of device and manufacturing technologies, enabling industry standards, and business models.

Other areas of high interest included (with presentation excerpts):

• Manufacturing applications that often co-exist with mainstream APC applications…

• Use of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) in a real production setting

• Other implementation technologies that support manufacturing at the gigafab scale

• Key enabling industry standards for all the above, especially data collection and traceability

Even though there is no substitute for being present at an interactive tutorial like this one, If you would like access to some or all of this material, please contact us at by clicking the button below, and we’ll be happy to share and discuss it with you. Who knows… perhaps as a result we’ll see you at next year’s Europe APCM conference.

Next year’s conference will be 10-12 April 2025 in Prague (Czech Republic), so mark your calendars and plan to spend a few informative days in one of Europe’s most iconic cities! And for you music lovers… come early and/or stay after – you won’t regret it.

Background

The SEMI North America Information & Control Committee meets three times per year; spring, summer and fall. This year the spring meetings were held on March 25, 26, and 27 at SEMI headquarters in Milpitas, CA. The meetings include task forces with leaders from Cimetrix on the GEM 300, ABFI (Advanced Backend Factory Integration), GUI, DDA, CDS task forces as well as the committee meeting, held on Wednesday. This is a summary of what happened in the task forces I am highly involved in, including GEM 300, ABFI and DDA. There were few ballots this last cycle, especially compared to the last meetings.  

Note that all ballots that pass in the committee are still subject to a final review by the global SEMI Audit & Review committee, where a ballot can still fail when proper SEMI procedures and regulations are not strictly followed. This is rare in the North America Information & Control Committee but can happen. 

GEM 300 Task Force

Ballot 6836A was modified to address issues raised by several voting members at the fall meetings. In this round of voting, the ballot passed with no rejecting votes and some minor comments from me. Ballot 6836A modifies both specifications E87 Carrier Management and E90 Substrate Tracking. In Substrate Tracking, the substrate object now defines a new optional attribute, “AdditionalInfo”. This attribute is used to designate a list of name/value pair information to be used as needed. The existence of the attribute is standardized, but the usage and values for the names in the name/value pair are custom to be used as needed. For example, an equipment handling multiple substrate types can use a name/value pair to distinguish between the different substrate types. In Carrier Management, carrier objects now define a related new optional attribute “AdditionalSubstrateInfoMap” to store the list of name/value pair information for all substrates in a carrier. These new features enable GEM 300 like E90 and E87 standards to be more easily adapted to all types of equipment and applications.

The Japan GEM 300 task force has proposed ballot 7173 to make minor improvements to the text in the GEM E30 standard. The proposed changes have been submitted to other regions including North America for review. None of the changes are technically significant and should not affect existing GEM implementations.

A few new ideas for ballots were also discussed at the task force. Following are some details on two items that were discussed.

The most prominent new discussion proposes changes to the E157 Specification for Module Process Tracking. Currently, adoption for this standard is limited to equipment that have one or more well-defined or virtual process modules. There are many types of equipment outside of Semiconductor Front-End that do not have a clear concept of a process module like equipment with conveyors moving substrates through the equipment. The new ballot would propose modifications to E157 to define a new, similar state model that can be adapted to report processing details for a substrate rather than a process module. This continues a trend at SEMI to make changes to allow for easier GEM adoption in other industries and more types of equipment.

Another ballot proposes some changes to the new ‘well-known’ subordinate standards to the GEM and GEM 300 standards that establishes standardized names for the alarms, data variables, collection events, status variables and equipment constants required by these standards. While these new subordinate standards have not yet been published, a couple changes are under consideration soon once they are published.

DDA (Diagnostics Data Acquisition) Task Force

• Ballot 7174 was approved to update E128 Specification for SML Message Structures with language to include Transport Layer Security (TLS) because Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) has been deprecated by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). E128 is a key standard in Equipment Data Acquisition communication freeze 1 and 2.
• Ballot 7175 was proposed to update E132 Specification for Equipment Client Authentication and Authorization and the E132 gRPC implementation with several issues found while preparing for EDA Vender Test #2.
  • Line item #1 introduced the most significant change; a modification to the password hash algorithm to be a binary array instead of a string. A binary array is more appropriate due to the software hash functions available to programmers. This line item failed due to a technical error in the ballot. The line item will be reworked to resolve this technical mistake and other errors that were revealed later in the week during EDA Vender Test #2.
  • Line item #2 moves some requirements from E134 to E132 in cooperation with ballot 7176. This ballot adds the requirements to E132 and passed.  
• Ballot 7176 was approved to move requirements from E134 Specification for Data Collection Management to E132 in cooperation with ballot 7175 line item #2. This ballot removes the requirements from E134. 
• Ballot 7191 approved changes to E179 Specification for Protocol Buffers Common Components. The ballot primarily introduces some optimizations to the protocol buffer usage to avoid sending parameter type information twice. This affects both ParameterValueType and ArrayParameterValue in the protocol buffer implementation. The changes also clarify the handling of 1, 2 and 4-byte integers by separating into unique types in E179. 
• A software vender test #2 was held on the day following the North America Information & Control Spring meetings. Anyone implementing client and/or server software was invited to attend. Instead of testing for standard compliance, the purpose of the vender test was to test interoperability and flush out any remaining issues in the EDA freeze 3 standards. This software vender test session #2 focused on previously untested E132 features from software vender test session #1 and will also include E125 tests. Several companies including Cimetrix attended the vender test session, providing both client and server functionality for testing against each other. Although official results of the test have not yet been made public, the primary issue discovered is that the password hash algorithm needs to be clarified. 
• A software vender test session #3 will be held either immediately following the North America Information & Control Summer meetings held in conjunction with SEMICON West in July, or after the Fall meetings in November. This test session will focus on E134 testing. Mid-April the task force will decide when to proceed.
• Future ballots were proposed for E125, E134, and E179 without specific known issues. In addition to the open ballot for E132, the task force can handle making any last minute changes to the EDA standards before EDA freeze 3 is declared.

ABFI (Advanced Backend Factory Integration) Task Force

No ballots were adjudicated in the ABFI task force. Instead, the task force conducted several open discussions. 

• A ballot has been approved to proposed modifications to E90 Specification for Substrate Tracking to accommodate equipment that have multiple substrate ID readers. Currently E90 assumes that an equipment only has one type of substrate and therefore one substrate ID reader. As the GEM 300 standards are implemented on more backend equipment, issues like this are revealed and need a standardized resolution.
• A previous proposal, 6840, to create a Specification for Equipment Adoption Criteria for GEM and GEM-Based Standards was cancelled. In its place a new proposal was approved to create a Guide for Equipment Adoption Criteria for GEM and GEM-Based Standards. A guide differs from a specification because it does not include any requirements. The new guide will help anyone implementing GEM technology understand how the vast number of GEM related standards fit together and when they should be used.
• A new activity was introduced to consider handling substrates with topside and bottom-side identification. More to come as the task force investigates this further. 
  
  

SEMICON West 2024

The next North America Information and Control meetings will be held in conjunction with SEMICON West in San Francisco. The dates will be July 9-11, 2024. Due to the association with SEMICON West, these meeting typically have the most in person attendees.

Background

The SEMI North America, the Information & Control Committee meets three times per year; spring summer and fall. This year the fall meetings were held on November 6, 7 and 8, 2023 at SEMI headquarters in Milpitas, CA. The meetings include task forces with leaders from Cimetrix on the GEM 300, ABFI (Advanced Backend Factory Integration), GUI, DDA, CDS task forces as well as the committee meeting on the final day which was held on Thursday instead of the typical Wednesday. This is a summary of what happened in the task forces I am highly involved in including GEM 300, ABFI and DDA. The recent voting cycle included 22 ballots—the most ballots in one voting cycle that we have seen for a very long time.  

Note that all ballots that pass in the committee are still subject to a final review by the global SEMI Audit & Review committee, where a ballot can still fail when proper SEMI procedures and regulations are not strictly followed. 

GEM 300 Task Force

A lot is going on the GEM 300 task force. The following SEMI standards were reapproved: E39 and E39.1. Reapprovals occur every 5 years else a standard becomes inactive.  

Ballot 7066A proposed changes to the SEMI E87 Carrier Management Services (CMS) standard. This ballot failed previous voting, but now time passed as a ‘superclean’ ballot (no negatives or comments during voting). This ballot included a significant change to the Carrier Ready to Unload Prediction feature which is now called a Carrier Complete Prediction. Anyone who implemented Carrier Ready to Unload Prediction will have to make a lot of changes to comply with the new implementation. A primary driver for this change is to accommodate internal buffer equipment where the READY TO UNLOAD state depends on when the host sends a CarrierOut message and the queue of previously requested activities; therefore, not a useful prediction to make. 

The benefit of this new state model is to notify the factory host before a carrier is completed so that the automatic delivery can be scheduled to arrive for pickup when the carrier is ready. This can shorten the time it takes for the factory to move material from one equipment to the next. 

Seven similar ballots 7114, 7115, 7116, 7117, 7118, 7119 and 7120 were submitted respectively for standards E5/E30, E40, E87, E90, E94, E116 and E157 to define a ‘well-known name’ for each require collection events, variables and alarms. The ‘well-known’ names are aliases for mapping purposes; necessary because each implementation can use different names. The ultimate goal of this feature is to make the GEM and standards based on GEM more plug-and-play. This new feature serves at least two purposes. Standard E172 already defines a well-known name attribute in the SECS Equipment Data Dictionary (SEDD) file. In the Equipment Data Acquisition (EDA) standard freeze 3 version, E164 will use this well-known name as well. The regular GEM documentation can also reference the well-known name. To explain the value of this feature, E90 requires a collection event for Substrate Location State Model transition 1. Implementers might define this collection event using any name such as E90_Loc_Unoccupied2Occupied, SLTrans1, SubstrateLocationUnoccupiedToOccupied or CollectionEvent901. Any name is allowed. The new well-known name establishes a standardized alias name called the well-known. 

When ballot 7117 is published, the well-known name table establishes well-known name “E90:SubstrateLocation:001:Unoccupied-Occupied” as the standardized alias for this collection event. This SEDD file can be downloaded through the GEM interface, tell the GEM host exactly which collection event implements the Substrate Location State Model transition 1. During the Information & Control Committee, ballot 7117 resulted in a Ratification ballot handling a long existing E90 naming issue for one status variable. All of the other ballots passed with a simple editorial change. 

A few of the above well-known name ballots included additional line items to resolve issues in the respective standard, mostly editorial or minor. Ballot 7114 included an E5 clarification that Stream 21 Function 17/18 sequence can be aborted by the receiving entity with an S21F0 message. Ballot 7116 included several additional changes/corrections to E87. 

1.    Clarification on the CARRIER SLOT MAP STATUS state SLOT MAP VERIFICATION FAILED, which sometimes was spelled in E87 without the ‘ED’ in FAILED. 
2.    Corrections to Table R1-21 in the table heading.

3.    Carrier object attribute Capacity can now be format code 51, 52 or 54, increasing the allowed carrier size from 255 to 4.29 GB to accommodate carriers not holding wafers but smaller substrates. 
4.    Carrer state model transition 7 includes a new trigger as already described scenario R1-21. 
5.    Scenario R1-20 was reverted to its original design, undoing an error introduced in 2012

6.    And finally, equipment constant BypassReadID was added to E87.1. This equipment constant has been defined in E87 but missing in E87.1

Ballot 9836 proposed some synchronized changes in E87 and E90 to define new name/value pair attributes. The ballot failed due to some limiting details in the value format definition. The ballot intends to allow equipment and factory to agree to using additional substrate content and characteristic information.

The Japan GEM 300 task force is working on improving the GEM E30 standard. The task force proposed a number of minor improvements mostly editorial to clean up several areas with the specification. Although the work was originally proposed to occur in the North America group, the task force decided to handle this ballot in Japan who will meet in December of 2023. Of course, the regional GEM 300 task forces worldwide all share and vote together on all E30 ballots.

DDA (Diagnostics Data Acquisition) Task Force

The DDA task force reapproved three standards: E128, E138 and 145. Additionally, the DDA task force made more plans to complete the Equipment Data Acquisition (EDA) freeze 3 version. Here are the key activities and findings as of today:

• E164 will be modified to incorporate the well-known names from the GEM 300 force. Instead of including all GEM 300 standards directly in the E164 primary standard, each GEM 300 standard will have a smaller, simpler E164 subordinate standards (E164.1, E164.2, …) to define the EDA implementation for that standard. This strategy makes adopting EDA and E164 more flexible to use in industries beyond semiconductor front end equipment.
• Some errors were found in the published .proto files for E132 and E134. New ballots will be submitted as soon as possible to make corrections.
• A software vendor test #2 will be held immediately following the North America Information & Control Spring meetings. Anyone implementing client and/or server software is invited to attend. Instead of testing for standard compliance, the purpose of the vender test is to test interoperability and flush out any remaining issues in the EDA freeze 3 standards. This software vender test session #2 will focus on previously untested E132 features from software vender test session #1 and will also include E125 tests. Anyone interested in joining should contact me (Brian Rubow) or Albert Fuchigami (Brian’s co-leader). Prior to the software vender test session, the task force co-leaders will provide a test plan document and .proto files with corrections in E132 for known issues.
• A software vender test session #3 will be held immediately following the North America Information & Control Summer meetings held in conjunction with SEMICON West. This test session will focus on E134 testing. 

ABFI (Advanced Backend Factory Integration) Task Force

Ratification ballots R2924A and R6925A both passed. This means that the new Consumables and Durables standard is in the SEMI publication queue. 

Additionally, ballot 6948 passed with several great improvements to the E142 substrate mapping standard. The improvements should help users better understand how to use the E142 schema files for more consistent adoption by implementers. 

Spring 2024

The next North America Information and Control spring meetings will be held again at SEMI headquarters in Milpitas, California. The dates will be March 25-27, 2024. Although many attendees were remote during these meetings, I expect many more attendees to be in person at these spring meetings due to the EDA software vender test session.  

To learn more about the SEMI Standards and the work we do as members of SEMI, please click the button below.

Background

The China summer SEMI Standards meeting was convened on August 8, 2023 in Shanghai. Two task forces met; the ABFI (Advanced Backend Factory Integration) and GEM300 Task force in the TC China Chapter. I actively participated in both task forces to closely monitor and comprehend all activities discussed during the meeting.

ABFI (Advanced Backend Factory Integration) Task Force

Ballot 7018, one Line Item revision to the SEMI E87-0921, Specification For Carrier Management(CMS) and E87.1-0921, Specification for SECS-II Protocol for Carrier Management(CMS).

It provides a means for the host or equipment to provide the slot map, which contains information regarding the correct and incorrect placement of substrates within a carrier. Additionally, it supports configuration settings that indicate the slot map is not read and will not be verified against host-provided information.  Furthermore, new related roundtrip scenarios are added to Related Information 1 – Carrier Object ID when the equipment lack the hardware for scanning a carrier’s slot map. This ballot was submitted for cycle-2 voting in February 2023 but received three rejections with a total of five negatives. During the ABFI Task Force meeting, we thoroughly reviewed and addressed these negative items.  Consequently, we will revise this ballot accordingly and submit it to the A&R committee for review. 

1. Line Item #1, Reject from Miyamoto Motoki (Yokogawa)
   • Negative 1 to Line Item #1 :  Accepted and do modification according to negative comments.
   • Negative 2 to Line Item #1-g : Accept and do modification according to negative comments.
2. Line Item #1 Reject from Matsuda Mitsuhiro (KKR)
   • Negative 1 to Document 7018 Line Item #1:  Negatives is not related with this ballot. This negative was not accepted by Task Force.
   • Negative 2 to Document 7018 Line Item #1:  Negatives is related but not persuasive. This negative was not accepted by Task Force.
3. Line Item #5 Reject No.1 from Mochizuki Tadashi (TEL)
   • After communication, voter withdrew the reject.

GEM 300 Task Force

In this task force we proposed two SNARFs, one for a line item revision to E40-1218, Specification For Processing Management, and another for E40.1-1218, Specification For SECS-II Protocol For Processing Management, and another for a line item revision to E94-0819R, Specification For Control Job Management and the E94.1-0819R, Specification For SECS-II Protocol For Control Job Management (CJM).
 
Some background information is useful here. In the semiconductor industry, the E90 Specification for Substrate Tracking, E40 and E94 are used together to monitor the substrate and job status in most 300mm frontend and advanced backend factories. Typically, after completing a job, it is the responsibility of the factory host to check the state of all materials to determine if the job has been successfully finished. However, some factories do not track E90 substrate events, and/or certain equipment types lack the capability to report such events. Additionally, some factories believe that the calculation of processed materials, failed materials and  unprocessed materials in a job should be performed on the equipment side, which then provides the final processed results. These factors make it challenging for the factory host to check the process status (processed, failed or unprocessed) of all materials in a job. As more straightforward data reporting requirements have accumulated from various factories, many equipment suppliers have developed their own means for delivering the processed substrate lists and counts. However, due to a lack of reference standards for these requirements and implementations, many variations exist in the data formats used to serve this single purpose.
 
These two SNARFs include revisions as follows to cover the above requirements and gaps:
1. Add new definitions for the Processed, Failed and Unprocessed state of materials.
2. Add a state matrix to better explain the E90 substrate processing states
3. Add new material processing result-related variables for job (process job and control job) events.
4. Add new object attributes for material processing result of job a (process job and control job) objects.
 

Note that these two SNARFs have undergone formal review, and ballots 7139 and 7140 were created as a result.

This blog provides a summary of the deliberations that took place during both task force meetings. For more information about these standards meetings, or questions about Cimetrix, please contact us by clicking the button below.

The Cimetrix EquipmentTest software product provides a feature for creating a user interface which can be thoroughly customized according to user preferences. The user interface is created as a user control in Microsoft Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) using the standard .NET Integrated Development Environment, and appears as a separate tab following the default “Tests” tab in EquipmentTest. The tab header can also be customized to fit different testing scenarios. Note that the EquipmentTest Pro version is required to develop a customized GUI tab in any plug-in.

This feature is useful for a variety of user types. For instance, factories can run tests back to back on their equipment and use the custom GUI feature to save the output logs as separate files on the system to efficiently identify failed cases. Equipment manufacturers can use this feature to customize their test scenarios and analyze results in a way that enables the comparison of previous test output data to the latest results. Other user types may imagineer all sorts of additional possibilities, making EquipmentTest a truly versatile tool. 

How To Add a Custom GUI Tab To a Plug-in

One can either override or append to the OtherTabs property of the PluginBaseModel class to add as many GUI tabs as needed. The examples below include code snippets for both cases.

The following image shows a general plug-in with two GUI tabs in which the custom GUI has been modified to contain a single button.

Uses for Customized GUIs in a Plug-In

The following paragraphs discuss two elegant uses for customized GUIs in EquipmentTest.

Duplicate a Different Control Panel

If you are a new user of EquipmentTest, you can use the custom GUI feature to recreate familiar interfaces from other test systems. Since the GUI is developed in WPF, you have a great deal of flexibility and control over the layout and operation of the GUI. This means that the tests can be modified to be run according to  specific user selections, and/or additional information specific to the chosen tests can be included on the GUI. For instance, logs can be modified to include more detail than is currently shown on the default screen.

The following Images show the TESTConnect user interface and its recreated GUI on EquipmentTest. Of course, it is not an exact replica, but most of the original functionality can be supported, and with some effort, the GUI could be modified to become an exact match.

Compile On the Fly

The EquipmentTest custom GUI feature enables use of the compile-on-the-fly capability of .NET. If you can dynamically write and run test code, tests scenarios can be changed without editing, rebuilding, and loading the plug-in each time a change is required. this results in a faster and more efficient testing process.

The “Compile” method defined below takes in the test code to be run as a parameter. It is then compiled to create a DLL library with the required references. Any compilation errors are written to a designated TextBox on the GUI through the event handler “WriteLog”.

The following image is a GEM plug-in with an additional custom control panel for dynamically running code. The TextBox is dedicated for writing code, and the various buttons are used to control the testing procedures. This example is part of a project that supported direct execution of TESTConnect scripts in EquipmentTest.

The first task was creating a console application to generate an XML file containing the converted C# test code of the TESTConnect script to be passed as the argument. The next task was developing an EquipmentTest plug-in that loads the XML file and displays each script as a separate test on the example GUI shown below. This example is designed to support any number of tests, and new tests can be added using the “New” button. In this way, you can directly write code to send messages and check to see if the reply message is the expected one. The example also defines wrapper methods to reuse this messaging code and thereby speeding the development process for similar use cases. Console output can be redirected to text boxes designated for logging, and wrapper methods can be defined to log message details. Although this feature effectively enables scripting in EquipmentTest, there are a few drawbacks that must be addressed. Whenever you need to use a new API method, you must add the reference to the required library in the plug-in, rebuild and load it again to continue testing. A good solution is a 'Save' button which allows you to create an XML file similar to the one you initially loaded with the current changes so you can directly load it after adding the library references. Another issue is that the aesthetic feel code written in Visual Studio will differ from that of the text boxes in EquipmentTest.

However, the overall picture is bigger than what I have explained here. You can customize EquipmentTest to run your tests in any way you prefer. If you need more space to write your test code, you can edit the test code in a C# file stored on your computer and directly run it from EquipmentTest. You may or may not display the code on a text box on the EquipmentTest GUI. Moreover, you can also save the generated output logs in a local file as well. It is up to you to further explore this feature.

Conclusion

In the previous paragraphs, we explained what a custom GUI plug-in is and how to access it with a dedicated GUI tab. This is a powerful capability that opens up a wide range of possibilities for all the users of EquipmentTest. We highly recommend that you explore this feature and puttit to good use to increase your testing productivity while reducing the overall effort to achieve results. The EquipmentTest documentation is a great source of additional information, and we sincerely hope we’ve convinced you to give it a try!

Process Recipe Management Custom Message Handling

Process Recipe Management provides a means to transfer process specifications and to share the management of these specifications between the host and the equipment. CCF provides GEM-compliant Process Recipe Management through class RecipeHandler which handles Steam 7 functions used for formatted and unformatted process programs. In some cases, CCF users may want to implement equipment-specific recipe handling, which can be done by extending the methods of RecipeHandler. For example, to customize host-initiated S7F5 for a recipe to be uploaded from the equipment, create a subclass MyRecipeHandler from RecipeHandler, and override the RecipeRequest method.

Follow this same approach to use the customized message handling class properly: before creating the FactoryAutomationServer, create a CimConnectServices and assign it to the CimConnectServices instance. Then create the custom message handling class MyRecipeHandler and assign it to the corresponding property on the CimConnectServices.Instance.

Custom SECS-II Message Handling

CCF provides a mechanism that enables the equipment’s GEM interface to support any SECS-II messages. These can be additional SECS-II messages defined in the SEMI E5 standard but not supported by CCF, and/or they can be custom SECS-II messages defined by and required by the end user or by the equipment supplier. For example, if a user wants to handle a custom message S100F1, they can create a subclass CustomMessageHandler and let it implement the IGemHandler interface, and then initialize it by overriding the Initialize method of CIMConnectServices.

To learn more about GEM interface custom message handling, please schedule a time to talk with a Cimetrix representative by clicking the button below.

This blog explains an approach that Cimetrix CIMControlFramework^TM (CCF) developers can use to dynamically generate ECVs (EquipmentConstant Variables) in source code as a convenient, effective alternative to including them in the default configuration file.

When implementing the GEM interface for equipment, it is often necessary to define EquipmentConstant Variables (ECVs). If the GEM interface is part of a CCF-based equipment control system, you would normally define the ECVs in the Equipment.epj file. However, registering the ECVs with this approach can take a lot of effort in a number of situations. Among them:

• When you need to register hundreds or even thousands of ECVs;
• When you need to dynamically register ECVs based on the specific configuration of an instance of the equipment;
• When you want to register ECVs without changing the EPJ file.

In these cases, dynamically generating the ECVs from the source code easily addresses these challenges.

The rest of this posting briefly shows you how to accomplish this, and how to change and monitor the values of ECVs.

How to generate ECVs programmatically 

After calling ecs.Start() inside Supervisor's Run(), the code sample below generates an ECV.

What you need to be most careful about here is that the ecid and ECV’s name should not be duplicated with other VIDs.

Then you can see the newly generated ECV  in the Equipment Constants screen of the OperatorInterface.

How to change the value of an ECV

The ECV’s value can be updated  through FactoryAutomationServer using the code below.

You can then see a message that the ECV’s value has been changed.

How to detect the ECV’s value change

If you want to detect changes to the ECV’s value, you can receive a callback  by registering ValueChangedHandler as shown in the code sample below.

To Summarize:

• You can dynamically generate an ECV by calling CreateVariable of CIMConnect;
• You can change the value of an ECV by calling SetEquipmentConstants of FactoryAutomationServer;
• You can detect changes in the value of the ECV by calling RegisterValueChangeHandler of CIMConnect.

All are helpful solutions for CCF developers who need to generate ECVs dynamically.

To learn more about this solution and other CCF programming best practices, please schedule a time to talk with a Cimetrix representative.