An object-based controller for equipment communications in semiconductor manufacturing

Traditionally, all the conventional semiconductor equipment must comply with the semiconductor equipment and materials international (SEMI) semiconductor equipment communication standard/generic equipment model (SECS/GEM) standards to interface with the cell controllers of a legacy manufacturing execution system (MES). In 1998, SEMATECH developed the computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) framework specification to facilitate the creation of an integrated, common, flexible, modular object model leading to an open, multi-supplier CIM system environment in the semiconductor industry. Later, SEMI developed an object-based equipment model (OBEM) standard to take full advantage of the CIM framework. With OBEM, the equipment can communicate with the CIM framework directly by method invocation. This work develops an OBEM-compliant object-based equipment (OBE) in the framework environment, so that this equipment can directly communicate with the MES by method invocation without using the SECS/GEM protocol. The unified modeling language is adopted as the major tool for analyzing and developing the target system. A SECS/GEM adapter is also added on the OBE to enable the OBE to communicate with a legacy factory that uses SECS/GEM standards as the communication protocol. A die bonder is used as an example for development demonstrations.