【翻译】智能制造中EDA （Interface A）应用及益处系列: 新系列介绍

随着最近SEMI EDA(设备数据采集，也称为Interface A) 标准的采用速度在过去18个月里显著加快，现在是时候强调那些在整个行业中充分利用这些标准的应用，以及由此带来的具体制造效益。

本系列的文章并不是简单地建议如何利用这些标准的性能、灵活性和体系结构特性。相反，它们是从实际生产经验中获得的前沿应用特定的微型案例研究。因此，它们可以为那些正在考虑潜在的试点项目，甚至在工厂范围内部署EDA标准的公司提供真正的指导。

本系列的另一个重要方面是，所描述的应用程序影响到半导体制造公司中的广泛利益相关者。当然，这包括工艺控制工程师和统计建模支持人员，他们负责所有现代晶圆厂的故障检测和分类（FDC）实施策略。 因为这种应用一直是这些EDA接口提供的高密度，精确描述设备/工艺的数据和相关的上下文信息的最初消费者。

然而，EDA支持的应用程序的其他直接受益者远远超出了这一群体，包括：

• 负责实时监控设备和工厂吞吐量， 确定消除单个设备类型以及整个工厂的等待浪费时间，解决出现的瓶颈问题的工业工程师；

• 负责确定物料放行计划，并管理工厂调度/派遣系统，以适应客户订单和/或工厂状态的变化的生产控制人员；

• 负责机队匹配和管理，尽量减少或消除为关键工艺步骤提供特定设备集的需要，从而简化整个工厂的调度过程的设备工程师；

• 负责最小化设备停机时间，MTTR(平均维修时间)，和设备恢复生产状态就绪所需的晶圆使用量的维护工程师；

• 负责从底层车间的泵、冷却器、排气系统和其他复杂子系统收集数据并将其集成到生产数据管理基础设施中，以供越来越多的分析应用程序使用的厂务工程师

• 负责补充关键工艺和测量设备的内置传感和控制能力，以支持先进的过程开发的传感器集成专家

……等等

尽管这些应用程序文章各不相同，但它们都有一个共同的概要，其中包括所解决的制造问题的陈述；所需的主要解决方案组件的说明; 讨论解决方案如何利用EDA标准的特定、独特的特性; 最后，确定被解决方案影响的关键ROI(投资回报)因素。此外，在可能的情况下，还将提供示例ROI计算，以便读者能够根据自己的公司环境对其进行调整，从而量化实现类似应用程序解决方案的潜在好处。

从上面的描述，你可能会倾向于认为这个系列主要关注的是半导体制造公司(IDM和代工厂)的业务，但事实并非如此。由于强调的应用程序的性能在很大程度上取决于提供数据的设备接口的“质量”(因为没有更好的术语)，因此设备供应商在实现预期效益方面发挥着重要作用。具体地说，元数据模型(由SEMI E120、E125和E164指定)定义了设备的参数、状态、事件、异常和其他可用的数据，并为外部访问结构化这些信息，从本质上形成了设备供应商与其工厂客户之间的数据收集“契约”。因此，设备供应商工厂客户必须仔细规定和协商EDA实施的详细要求。这不会在一夜之间发生，因为对未来设备设计的影响是重大的。

正如许多行业专家已经表示的那样，无论您在价值链上的位置如何，现在都是半导体行业令人激动的时刻。对于那些参与收集和使用设备数据来优化工厂性能的人，我们希望您会发现接下来的一系列文章对于制定您自己公司的EDA实施路线图特别有用。

 

EDA Applications and Benefits for Smart Manufacturing: Introduction to a New Series

 

With the adoption of the latest SEMI EDA (Equipment Data Acquisition, also known as Interface A) standards accelerating significantly over the past 18 months, it is time to highlight the applications across the industry that make the best use of these standards, and the specific manufacturing benefits that result.

The articles in this series are not simply suggestions of what one could do by leveraging the performance, flexibility, and architectural features of these standards. Rather, they are leading edge application-specific mini-case studies derived from actual production experience, and as such, can provide genuine guidance for those companies just now contemplating potential pilot projects or even factory-wide deployments of the EDA standards.

 

Another important aspect of this series is that the applications described affect a broad range of stakeholders in a semiconductor manufacturing company. These include, of course, the process control engineers and statistical modeling support staff responsible for the Fault Detection and Classification (FDC) implementation strategy in all modern wafer fabs, since this application has consistently been the initial consumer of the high-density, precisely framed equipment/process data and associated context information provided through the EDA interfaces.

However, other direct beneficiaries of EDA-enabled applications extend well beyond this group, and include:

 Industrial engineers responsible for monitoring equipment and factory throughput in real-time, identifying opportunities to eliminate wait time waste in individual equipment types as well as

the overall factory, and addressing bottlenecks as they shift and emerge;

 Production control staff responsible for determining the material release schedule and managing the factory scheduling/dispatching systems to accommodate changes in customer orders and/or factory status;

 Equipment engineers responsible for fleet matching and management to minimize or eliminate the need to dedicate certain equipment sets for critical process steps and thereby simplify the overall factory scheduling process;

 Maintenance engineers responsible for minimizing equipment downtime, MTTR (mean time to repair), and test wafer usage required to bring equipment back to production-ready state;

 Facilities engineers responsible for collecting and integrating sub-fab data from pumps, chillers, exhaust systems, and other complex subsystems into the production data management infrastructure for use by a growing range of analysis applications;

 Sensor integration specialists responsible for supplementing the built-in sensing and control capabilities of critical process and measurement equipment to support advanced process development…

… and the list goes on.

Despite their diversity, these application articles all share a common profile, which includes a statement of the manufacturing problem addressed; a description of the major solution components required; a discussion of how the solution leverages specific, unique characteristics of the EDA standards; and finally, identification of the key ROI (return on investment) factors that are impacted by the solution. In addition, where available, example ROI calculations will be provided so that the readers can adapt them to their own company environments to quantify the potential benefit of implementing a comparable application solution.

From the above description, you may be tempted to assume that the series focuses mostly on the careabouts of semiconductor manufacturing companies (IDMs and foundries)… but this is not the case. Since the performance of the highlighted applications depends heavily on the “quality” (for lack of a better term) of the equipment interfaces supplying the data, the equipment suppliers have a major role to play in achieving the promised benefit. Specifically, the metadata models (specified by SEMI E120, E125, and E164) that define the parameters, states, events, exceptions, and other data available from the equipment and structure this information for external access essentially form the data collection “contract” between the equipment suppliers and their factory customers. For this reason, the detailed requirements for this aspect of the EDA implementation must be carefully specified and negotiated. This will not happen overnight, as the implications for future equipment design are significant.

As a number of industry experts have already expressed, it is an exciting time to be in the semiconductor industry, regardless of your position along the value chain. For those involved in the collection and use of equipment data to optimize factory performance, we hope you will find the coming series of articles especially useful in formulating you own company’s EDA implementation roadmap.

 

Topics: EDA/Interface A, Smart Manufacturing/Industry 4.0, EDA in Smart Manufacturing Series

Posted by Alan Weber: Vice President, New Product Innovations, Cimetrix