Industry News, Trends and Technology, and Standards Updates

In Sir Arthur Conon Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia, Sherlock Holmes tells Watson, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

In a March 2016 blog post on CCF work breakdown Cimetrix listed eleven points to be taken into consideration when starting an equipment control application using CIMControlFramework (CCF). One of the tasks in the work breakdown is to determine what kind of data collection and storage is to be used in your CCF application and determine how that data is to be stored.

CCF provides several mechanisms for collecting and storing data. These include:

• History Objects

• Full GEM Interface

• Full EDA/Interface A Interface

• Centralized DataServer

The remainder of this blog post will look at each of these items in more detail.

History Objects

In early iterations of CCF, users noticed when using logging, there were certain messages that they wanted to be able to query without the overhead of having to search all log messages. To help accommodate this need, History objects were introduced. Some examples of these objects in CCF are EPT History, Wafer History and Alarm History. When an important event happens in the life of a history object, a log message is written to a database table (configured during CCF installation) that corresponds to that type of object. That database table can be queried for the specific historical information for only that type of data. 

Full GEM/GEM 300 Interface

As described in a CCF blog post from February 15, 2017, CCF comes standard with a fully implemented GEM and GEM 300 interface. The GEM standards allow users to set up trace and event reports for the collection of GEM data. No additional programming is required by the application developer to have access to the GEM data collection.

Full EDA/Interface A Interface

The same blog post of February 15th also states that CCF comes standard with a fully implemented Freeze II and E164 compliant EDA interface. EDA can be used to set up data collection plans based on Events, Exceptions and Traces. With the E157 standard and conditional trace triggers, EDA makes it easy to zero in on the data you want without having to collect all data and then sift through it later.

Centralized DataServer

In order to create, initialize, populate and pass data, CCF uses a centralized DataServer object. The DataServer is responsible for creating the dynamic EDA equipment modelas well as populating CIMConnect with Status Variables, Data Variables, Collection Events and Alarms. All this is done at tool startup so that the data available exactly matches the tool that is in use.

Data is routed to the DataServer which then updates the appropriate client – such as EDA, GEM or the Operator Interface. An equipment control application can register to receive an event from the data server when data changes. Users can key off of this event to capture that data and route it to a database as desired. Since all tool manufacturers have different requirements for which database to use and how data is written to that database, CCF leaves the actual SQL (or equivalent) commands for writing the data to the equipment application developer.

With CCF Data collection and storage is … Elementary.

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

What does this mean and why should I care?

The SEMI standards for 300mm Semiconductor Manufacturing Equipment can be an overwhelming burden of information to understand, let alone implement.

The GEM standards comprise over 450 pages of documentation: E4, E5, E30, E37, E37.1, E172, E173.

The 300mm standards add another 280 pages: E39, E40, E87, E90, E94, E116, E157, E148.

And the EDA standards pile on an additional 480 pages: E120, E125, E128, E132, E134, E138, E164.

That’s over 1200 pages of standards documents filled with requirements and implementation information. 

On top of that GEM and EDA collect data differently from the equipment.  See a post we did on data collection for more information on those differences.

Implementing the requirements defined in those standards without an SDK would be a very brave undertaking.  Even with SDKs for the standards, it would be a fair amount of work, when all you really want to do is get your equipment automated.

In addition, it is very important that those standards be implemented correctly in order for your equipment to be smoothly integrated and accepted into each fab.  Different fabs use the standards slightly differently or have additional requirements.   This requires experience.

GEM300 and EDA standards implementation is a very large burden.

So what does this mean?

One of the large tasks for the EDA standards is defining a hierarchical model of the equipment and what data it can produce in XML per the schemas defined in the standards.   Creating the initial model and keeping it up to date as the equipment evolves is a tedious task.  In addition, that model must be conformant to the E164 standard (which has over 10 pages of requirements on its own).   See our blog post on conformance testing. CCF does this for you, producing an E164 compliant EDA model in the background based on your CCF programming. See our blog post on CCF dynamic model creation further details.  CCF also builds the GEM interface model for you at the same time.

Further, CCF is completely GEM compliant and 300mm compliant, using the Cimetrix CIMConnect and CIM300 products which have been successfully deployed in every 300mm fab around the world on many different equipment types.

Twelve hundred pages of standards, compliantly implemented, at no additional effort.  That is what this means.

Turn that donkey into a goat and use CCF.

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

One of my favorite gifts when I was a kid was an erector set. I could build all kinds of machines and robots. The set I had even included a simple motor, so I could make things move. I spent a lot of hours building machines and robots and dreaming of doing that on a bigger scale.

When I graduated from college I worked for a small company that did warehouse automation and automated transport control systems. It took me back to when I was a boy building robots with my erector set. Except these robots could actually move things and had a full set of commands to control them, not just on or off. The company I worked for had a small group that did firmware programming for the robotic controllers. I worked in the software group that wrote the software systems for controlling the whole automated warehouse. I soon learned that each type of automated equipment had its unique set of commands and that just because two pieces of equipment might perform the same function, didn’t mean they used the same commands.

Along the way I had the opportunity to work with Motorola to develop cell controllers for one of their new, state-of-the-art fabrication facilities in Austin, Texas. This opened up a new world of automation for me. The SEMI Equipment Communication Standards (SECS) were fairly new and still trying to gain wide acceptance. There were a lot of similarities to the automated material handling equipment I had been working with. Each piece of equipment had a defined set of SECS messages it supported, but each tool had to be carefully characterized in order to know how to create the cell control application that would interface with it. It was exciting to bring new tools on line and see the benefits in reduced scrap and improved throughput. But it took a lot of time to develop the cell controllers and there wasn’t much code that could be reused from one to the next.

During this time, I had the opportunity to attend some SEMI standards meetings and participate in discussions about the development of a Generic Equipment Model (GEM) to achieve more consistency across different companies’ SECS interface implementations. It made so much sense! I had built a good business doing equipment characterizations for semiconductor manufacturing companies, but it seemed like there should be a better way of interfacing with the equipment – a more standard way. As the adoption of GEM grew in the semiconductor manufacturing industry, the cost of developing equipment cell control applications decreased. Much of the code could be used across different pieces of equipment, because there was a standard for interfacing with all equipment.

While GEM was developed by and for the semiconductor industry, it could also benefit many other industries. GEM provides a standard way to control a factory and gather equipment and process data that can be used to measure and monitor Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), implement Statistical Process Control (SPC), manage material queues and WIP levels, and a wide range of additional factory applications. Several parallel markets (PV, LED) have adopted the GEM standard to take advantage of commonality required by the standard. Other markets would also benefit by adopting the GEM standard to help increase software reuse and productivity

 In a previous blog we mentioned that two new SEMI standards, E172 and E173, demonstrated that the GEM standard was alive and well and even gaining new momentum by evolving to adopt new technology. The earlier blog focused on E172 with its SEDD files that use an XML schema to describe what is in a GEM interface. Today’s blog is about the E173 Specification for XML SECS-II Message Notation: a new way to log and document GEM/SECS messages, again using an XML schema.

A few years ago Cimetrix was involved in a project prototyping Wait Time Waste concepts and implementation alternatives. This work required Cimetrix engineers to review and extract data from many different SECS-II message log files from a variety of sources, and in the process, exposed a serious weakness in the industry. Because there was no standardized notation for logging SECS-II messages, everyone represented them differently, using different nuances and variations in their notation based loosely on SML (SECS Message Language, which is mentioned in the GEM standard). Additionally, SML itself was designed primarily for human readability, and certainly not for consumption by software programs; moreover, you can’t analyze a long message log without software to do the parsing for you. As a consequence, writing software to review the log files and to extract meaningful data from the log files was far more difficult than it should have been – SML and SML-like notations are simply not suitable for today’s needs. But now there is a suitable, industry-standard alternative. 

At Cimetrix we have utilized various notations for logging SECS-II messages for many years. In order for any notation to be useful it must meet certain criteria. First of all, it has to be easy for software to write (serialize). Secondly, it also needs to be easy for software to read (deserialize). And finally, it should be easy for humans to read and understand.

The original technique we used many years ago was based on the scripting language Tcl (pronounced “tickle”), which uses curly braces as structural delimiters. When programming within the Tcl language, this works very well. In other programming languages, however, it is easy to serialize, but not so easy to deserialize. Another technique Cimetrix had used for a few years was based on XML, which is well supported by all modern programming languages and an integral part of most internet activity. It is very easy to serialize and deserialize. And when formatted with carriage returns and indentation, it is quite easy to read for most humans (at least the ones who are software programmers or web page gurus).

Here is a subjective comparison between the notation alternatives using a scale of 1 to 5 where 5 is excellent and 1 is very poor or difficult.

At Cimetrix we decided to leverage our experience with XML, SECS/GEM standards and the SEMI Standards organization and related communities to develop a notation that everyone in the industry could benefit from. The result was this new standard: SMN. It is comprised of two parts: an XML schema defined specifically for GEM/SECS messaging; and a specification document describing how to use it (although many details of the specification are embedded as annotations within the XML schema file itself). It looks like this:

The schema is found on the SEMI website: http://dom.semi.org/web/wstandards.nsf/complementaryfiles

SMN brings the representation of SECS messages into the Internet era by defining an open, standard, XML-based notation for these messages. So what can you do with this? Here are some ideas:

• Document individual SECS/GEM messages (the SEMI E172 SEDD file uses SMN for this). You can also document entire message scenarios.

• Log individual SECS/GEM messages or scenarios in XML format. These can include only the messages, or might also include protocol messages (like the HSMS separate message).

• Share message logs with others. If their software supports SMN, they can immediately make use of it. This should increase collaboration in the manufacturing community, particularly between equipment suppliers and their customers.

• Embellish log files with comments and meaningful metadata, like data item names, variable names, collection event names, etc.

• Analyze and extract information from log files offline for projects like Wait Time Waste, where you don’t need to process a live data stream.

• Log messages in a raw binary format to save disk space, yet encapsulated in XML for convenience.

• Many of the numerous XML tools in the software development community can now be used by SECS/GEM software developers. This opens up a world of opportunities.

• Products like our CIMConnect and CIM300 can make use of SMN to make it easier to implement GEM and GEM300 interfaces on the equipment by using the SECSData element from SMN to pass data from the equipment supplier’s software into our product.

It is exciting to see the GEM standard evolve and embrace new technologies like XML to make integrating manufacturing equipment into the factories easier and easier.

For more information about these latest standards, and how you can incorporate them into your interface implementation, please contact us.♦

Interest in SEMI standard E30, known as the GEM standard has grown in recent years. That interest has increased in various manufacturing industries has matured in which factories are seeking to increase automation and carefully monitor equipment activity in order to increase production and product quality. Initially, the GEM standard targeted just the semiconductor industry, but then expanded to include any industry that used manufacturing equipment. In fact, a number of years ago the name of the GEM Standard changed from the “Generic Model for Communication and Control of Semiconductor Equipment” to “Generic Model for Communication and Control of Manufacturing Equipment.” Adoption by other industries is possible because the GEM standard defines generic features to control and monitor any manufacturing equipment. The GEM standard technology is not limited to semiconductor manufacturing. Over time, other industries have taken notice, especially as they try to develop increased control over their equipment.

CIMConnect™ is the best software product on the market for implementing the GEM standard. Of course CIMConnect supports all of the required GEM features as well as additional capabilities. This even includes excellent support of the Spooling feature, which saves messages that are otherwise dropped during a loss of communication. Early implementations of the GEM standard by others gave the GEM standard’s Spooling feature a bad reputation. This reputation is undeserved when Spooling is implemented by a robust product like CIMConnect. In CIMConnect, not only does Spooling work; it works well. It has been proven by customers that CIMConnect’s Spooling implementation does not lose any messages—even while under high-stress conditions. This means that when using CIMConnect, the Spooling feature can be used to effectively preserve critical data from the equipment.

Another feature that makes CIMConnect the best GEM software product is the CIMConnect Control Panel. In the new CIMConnect release, this application was completely rewritten, redesigned in .NET,  giving it a modern look and feel while adding lots of new convenient functionality. With other GEM products, the GEM interface is essentially a black box. With CIMConnect, however, the Control Panel application gives full visibility into the GEM interface. And you can run it at any time during GEM interface development and also during production. This means that you can see what reports and traces are defined, the link between reports and events, the status of all state machines, the state of each alarm, the enable status of every event, the history of occurring collection events, the history of alarm state changes and the current values of all data variables, and status variables and equipment constants. You can also view and capture the SECS-II message logging at any time for scenario diagnostics. Additionally, the CIMConnect Control Panel provides features to simulate the occurrence of collection events, collection event data, alarms, and variable data; thereby making it a built-in simulator included requiring no additional effort. And when you are ready to update your GEM documentation appendix with the list of defined collection events, alarms, status variables, data variables, and equipment constants, use the documentation builder feature.

CIMConnect has also already adopted use of new SEMI standard E173 Specification for XML SECS-II Message Notation (SMN). CIMConnect allows software applications to use SMN notation both when providing variable values to CIMConnect, as well as when getting variable values from CIMConnect. This means that you can pass data around in XML, retaining the data type and data structure information; bringing the convenience of XML into the SECS/GEM technology. You can log the GEM communication messages using SMN format making log messages much more useful, and they are able to be easily deserialized by any software applications that has XML libraries.

For additional detailed information about CIMConnect or to request a product demonstration, please contact us.♦

As the SEMI GEM standard celebrates its 25^th birthday, you may have thought its evolution had just about run its course — but you’d be wrong. Last year, the Information and Control Committee of SEMI Standards passed two new standards that enhance the usability of the entire SECS/GEM suite of standards for equipment suppliers and semiconductor manufacturers alike: E172 SEDD and E173 SMN.

Let us talk about the first of these, the E172 Specification for the SECS Equipment Data Dictionary (SEDD) and postpone E173 Specification for XML SECS-II Message Notation (SMN) discussion for another blog. SEDD standardizes the approach for documenting an equipment’s GEM interface in a way that is both human- and computer-readable. All factories in every industry that use GEM require their equipment suppliers to provide GEM interface documentation in some electronic form for each type of equipment. This is because the GEM interface on every equipment type is unique, supporting unique features and publishing a unique set of data. Of course, the GEM standard itself requires documentation and what has to be in the documentation but does not specify how this is to be accomplished. Until now there has been no common approach or format. This has always left the equipment suppliers to come up with their own format. At best this might be in a multiple-tabbed Excel spreadsheet or a PDF file; and at worst a text document that might or might not have been accurate or even complete. And every equipment supplier completes the documentation in a different structure and style so that no two GEM documents look the same. In summary, everyone is trying to complete this GEM and factory requirement by providing documentation, but in the end what factories are receiving has to be consumed and digested differently based on the equipment supplier, and sometimes even based on the specific equipment type from the same equipment supplier. It is a lot of work for the factory just to understand exactly what is in each GEM interface.

SEDD was created to solve this problem by defining a standard XML schema for documenting a GEM interface. Equipment suppliers create an XML file that complies with the SEDD XML schema to document the GEM interface and then deliver this XML file (called an SEDD file) to the factory.

Why XML? Because XML is the perfect technology for organizing data into a uniform structure that is well supported by modern programming languages. This means that equipment suppliers can use a software program to generate the SEDD file. It also means that factories can write software to read and view the SEDD file. Moreover, they can create intelligent host applications that automatically configure themselves and adapt to a specific GEM interface.

So what’s in an SEDD file? Below is a visual representation of the SEDD file schema, identifying the major elements of the SEDD file.

So essentially the SEDD file includes a list of the data available for collection by a host, some general information about the equipment (in the header), and the format of the data variables, status variables and equipment constants. As an example of what details are included, here are the details for collection events.

As an example, for a collection event, the SEDD file includes a list of all collection events available, and the ID, name, description, related SEMI standard, and the list of related data variables and other variables for that collection event. This is everything you need to use a collection event.

So far this is a summary of what is available today in a SEDD file. Cimetrix is leading the GEM300 task to extend the SEDD file to include additional information. This work is in SEMI ballot 5872 that proposes to extend the SEDD file to also include:

• A list of supported SECS-II messages and the acceptable format for each message (using E172 SMN)

• A list of support remote commands and available parameters for each remote command

• A list compliance tables for supported SEMI standards

• The list of predefined event reports

This is all work that was postponed from the original SEDD standard development. Hopefully ballot 5872 will pass and make SEDD files even more useful. With this additional information an SEDD file would empower GEM host software to configure itself to fully communicate with a GEM interface and make all of the features in the GEM interface available.

This is one example of how GEM technology just keeps getting better. It is not surprising that GEM is getting used in more and more industries.

For more information about this latest standard, and how you can incorporate it into your interface implementation, please contact us.♦

The 2015 SEMICON Taiwan was held at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center in the Nangang District of Taipei City, Taiwan September 2-4.  The event drew over 30,000 visitors from all over the world for the three-day event with nearly 1,500 exhibits from a diverse array of companies and organizations across the semiconductor industry.

Cimetrix exhibited at SEMICON Taiwan trade show for the first time, in conjunction with its newest Asian partner, Flagship International.

This turned out to be the 20^th Anniversary of SEMICON Taiwan, so the mood was especially buoyant and the attendance brisk. SEMI also commemorated the event with a Gala Dinner at the Grand Hyatt on Wednesday night, and we were privileged to attend courtesy of our Flagship colleagues.

The president of Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, even made a guest appearance to thank the semiconductor industry for its contribution to Taiwan’s economic health. 

Shortly after the exhibition opened on Wednesday (Sept. 2), a couple of visitors from UMC showed up, and shared the latest work they’ve been doing with the Wait Time Waste (WTW) concepts that we had presented two years earlier. C.Y. Tiao and James Lin of UMC even made two presentations at the eMDC conference on this topic. 

From a standards perspective, this has now taken the form of SEMI E168, Specification for Product Time Measurement (PTM), and has been defined at the “time element” and supporting GEM/SECS message level for process equipment, automated material handling systems (AMHS), and material control systems (MCS). With the advent of SEMI E164 (EDA Common Metadata), these concepts are especially easy to implement, because all the events necessary to calculate the full suite of time elements are required by standard… but more on this is a later blog!

Since much of the world’s foundry capacity is in Taiwan, the equipment industry was well represented at the show, which included many of Cimetrix’ current customers as well as a few local prospects. As a result, Dave Faulkner and Kerry Iwamoto had a chance to visit a number of these firsthand.

Another highlight of the week for Cimetrix was participation in the eMDC (e-Manufacturing & Design Collaboration Symposium), where I made a presentation entitled “Data Fusion at the Source: Standards and Technologies for Seamless Sensor Integration” that addresses the challenges faced by process engineers in effectively using data from an increasing number of sources to analyze process behavior.

The basic idea is to handle the association of necessary context information (lot, substrate, product, layer, process, recipe, step, chamber, etc.) with the raw collected data as close to the source as possible, using a single, integrated model of the equipment and all related data sources. The equipment model that forms the foundation of the EDA/Interface A standards serves this purpose perfectly.

On a final related note, in visiting and talking with a number of the leading chip makers during the week, it seems that the adoption momentum for EDA is now building steadily, so we look forward to supporting this initiative across the value chain. Stay tuned for a late September post that will shed more light on this process!