Modeling a die bonder with Petri nets: a case study

The process of designing complex manufacturing machines involves problems of interdisciplinary communication, design space exploration as well as design evaluation and analysis that can best be solved by integrating modeling and simulation stages into the development process. Requirements necessary for a modeling environment are: support for hierarchical and modular structuring, module reuse, configurability of the model, executability of the model with a notion of time, and intuitive usability. The CodeSign object-oriented, temporal Petri net formalism with its associated tool is a modeling and simulation environment to meet those requirements. A case study conducted in an industrial setting is described that demonstrates the applicability of the CodeSign approach to the modeling of semiconductor manufacturing equipment with step-wise refinement. Results are given to show the accuracy of simulation results with respect to data actually measured on the machine. The CodeSign simulation results are shown to have superior accuracy compared to the output of a previous spreadsheet model of the same machine