Enhanced Equipment Health Monitoring Practice and Methodology

摘要

As the industry approaches challenges tracking the operation of Moore's Law within specified manufacturing cost and cycle time boundaries, IC makers and equipment suppliers will need to cooperate by developing new methodologies to improve equipment effectiveness, reliability, and performance. ISMI funded the Enhanced Equipment Quality Assurance (EEQA) activity in 2009 and 2010 to define the basis for improving equipment availability and reducing cost of ownership. The guidelines and methodologies set by the EEQA project are the basis for the definition of fingerprinting and equipment health monitoring. Description of the Approach The EEQA project presented several data usage scenarios and applied statistical data analysis to demonstrate how to monitor and determine equipment functional performance. The equipment functional performance is bonded not only to the mechanical operation of the equipment components but also to the interrelation of these components as a whole. When each of the equipment sub-components' performance and reliability are confirmed to work in accordance with their design, equipment process variability is improved and assumed to be more repeatable. In addition to defining the processes and high level requirements for adopting EEQA practices by the industry, the EEQA Working Group in 2010 built a software application with the basic capabilities and features that suppliers and device makers need to properly collect and use equipment data. This type of application can be used during fingerprinting.