SECAM: A Supervisory Equipment Control Application Model for Integrated Semiconductor Manufacturing Equipment

摘要

The semiconductor manufacturing and liquid crystal display manufacturing industry increasingly use integrated equipment, such as cluster tools, track equipment, and in-line equipment, each of which consists of several single-wafer processing modules (PMs) and wafer transport modules (TMs or devices. Such integrated equipment is built and supplied by tool vendors or configured and built by wafer fabricators using modules from different vendors. Even after integrated equipment is built and implemented based on a customer order, the PMs and wafer TMs are logically reconfigured to meet frequently changing recipes or wafer flow patterns. Each module has its own controller, usually based on an industrial personal computer, and the module controllers are monitored and coordinated by a supervisory equipment controller (SEC), such as a cluster tool controller (CTC) through a communication network, which is a complicated distributed control application. Such an SEC performs supervisory control functions of activity coordination and scheduling, monitoring and diagnosis, data management, and communication for the component modules or devices. To cope with diverse tool configuration and frequently changing recipes, it is essential to rapidly develop a supervisory equipment control application that can be flexibly reconfigured and is reliable and robust. Recent requirements on advanced process control (APC) functions for quick process fault detection and adaptive run-to-run process control require fast real-time monitoring and control. Some tools, for instance, cluster tools for some chemical vapor deposition processes, requiring strict timing requirements on the activities of the modules such that a wafer processed at a PM should leave the PM's chamber within a specified time limit in order to avoid quality problems due to residual gases and heat [1]. The development of an SEC, for instance, an advanced CTC, requires more than two years, 30 man-years, and coding of several hundred thousand lines. It has been a bottleneck for developing a new equipment. Therefore, communication between the module controllers and the SEC requires advanced high-level client-server communication for distributed remote control, complex data transfer, advanced messaging, and reliable real-time communication.