Sematech update on e-diagnostics standards efforts

09/01/2002

While the semiconductor industry is making significant progress in applying e-diagnostics in production fabs, Semi standards supporting those achievements are still under construction. The key guideline for equipment data acquisition (EDA) is on its way to becoming the first actual Semi-approved standard for e-diagnostics. Formally "Semi document 3508," it has been informally dubbed Interface A and is on a fast track for industry review.

Semi 3508 provides an overview of the motivation and requirements for the definition of a new data acquisition interface for semiconductor equipment. This interface description will guide consistent implementations of the current generation of equipment to provide e-diagnostics and equipment - engineering capability in the near term while final Semi specification standards take form.

Semi 3508 is also intended to jump-start e-diagnostics and other e-manufacturing ap plications by guiding the semi conductor industry de sign, im plementation, and performance experience using ex tensible markup language (XML), simple object access protocol (SOAP), and hypertext transport protocol (HTTP).

Related standards

At present, five associated standards are being developed:

Equipment client authentication & authorization specification (3507) defines how other applications will acquire permission to connect to equipment via the EDA interface. This specification will describe how applications will prove their identity to equipment and how permissions and capabilities will be allocated to each connecting application.

Data collection management specification (3509) outlines how data collection plans will be described, created, modified, and communicated.

Equipment services description specification (3510) defines how data to be passed through the EDA interface will be described to applications that receive the data.

Common equipment model specification (3522) defines a modeling construct for tools.

Guide for style and usage of XML for semiconductor-manufacturing applications (3523) establishes guidelines for consistency and interoperable usage of XML in semiconductor-manufacturing applications.

Through its role in pushing the completion of this standard, International Sematech (ISMT) is accelerating the industry's education in the areas of XML and SOAP.

Besides ISMT's lead, the process of reaching a final standard involved more than 1700 volunteer hours from members of the supplier and IC industries serving on the Semi Diagnostic Data Acquisition Task Force. Before finalizing this series of standards, ISMT seeks to confirm that these new Internet technologies will work in the operation of e-diagnostics and, later, e-manufacturing.

For the remainder of 2002, ISMT is hosting e-diagnostics prototype solutions and recently added a second request for proposals to prototype the interface described by Semi guide 3508. The purposes of this second round of prototyping are early verification of the integrity of the draft Equipment Data Acquisition standard and acceleration of the semiconductor industry's learning on this important new interface (see http:// www.sematech.org/ public
esources/e-manuf/ rfp/index.htm).

In 2003, standards will focus on an interface that securely transports relevant e-diagnostics data from factory servers to equipment supplier experts outside the factory for analysis.

Significant benefits

The semiconductor industry is moving from using proprietary software standards to leveraging mainstream computing technology. Indeed, we are now nipping at the heels of Internet standards. In addition, leading-edge suppliers are monitoring hundreds of tools in production fabs, applying e-diagnostics solutions, and reporting significant benefit.

Once e-diagnostics standards are finalized, expected benefits of this technology can be more rapidly put into place. The result will be felt throughout the industry, reducing mean time to diagnose problems, leading to greater equipment availability, and reductions in the time it takes to qualify a new tool.

Harvey Wohlwend manages e-diagnostics at International Sematech, 2706 Montopolis Drive, Austin, TX 78741; ph 512/356-7536, e-mail [email protected].