Development of an Interface C framework for semiconductor e-Diagnostics systems

Interface C has been defined as the access interface of an e-Diagnostics system by International SEMATECH. This paper proposes a novel Interface C framework, called ICF, which aims to be a solution to the implementation of Interface C. The ICF is developed using several technologies, such as Web Services, Clustering, XML-related security techniques, and object-oriented methods. In addition to providing a variety of e-Diagnostics functions, the ICF possesses dedicated mechanisms which can solve many important issues in Interface C, such as interoperability among distributed systems, supporting remote diagnoses through multi-party collaboration, data isolation for different suppliers, diagnostics service and storage failover for assuring system availability, and the security measures related to the above issues. A prototype e-Diagnostics system based on the ICF has been constructed. Integration tests show that it works smoothly with good performance and meets the designed objectives. It is believed that the proposed ICF can be an effective solution for implementing the Interface C of e-Diagnostics systems in semiconductor industry.