Data acquisition approach for real-time equipment monitoring and control

With current high standards for product quality, reliability and performance, semiconductor manufacturers are constantly looking for ways and means to monitor and control the processes in real-time. The real-time control increases the equipment utilization and positively impacts the yields. The data collection is key to implementation of above strategy. This paper presents a comprehensive data collection methodology for the Real-time data acquisition system. This methodology addresses the physical and logical aspects of data collection system. The business needs and technical/process limitations of various approaches to deal with logical aspects have been discussed. The methodology is illustrated using examples from actual tools (parameters, algorithms to control the parameters, and business impact). The methodology presented in this paper has been deployed to over 200 processing tools from various vendors at Texas Instruments (TI).