RTSPC: a software utility for real-time SPC and tool data analysis

Competition in the semiconductor industry is forcing manufacturers to continuously improve the capability of their equipment. The analysis of real-time sensor data from semiconductor manufacturing equipment presents the opportunity to reduce the cost of ownership of the equipment. Previous work by the authors showed that time series filtering in combination with multivariate analysis techniques can be utilized to perform statistical process control, and thereby generate real-time alarms in the case of equipment malfunction. A more robust version of this fault detection algorithm is presented. The algorithm is implemented through RTSPC, a software utility which collects real-time sensor data from the equipment and generates real-time alarms, Examples of alarm generation using RTSPC on a plasma etcher are presented