Development of remote control system of a semiconductor cluster tool

In recent years, the manufacturing industry of semiconductors has become prosperous in the world, and the cluster tool has been developed for the purpose of wafer processing. In this paper, the architecture and development for remote diagnosis and preventive maintenance of a cluster tool is proposed. Firstly, the cluster tool simulator is constructed by using a Petri net, and a selection engine of dispatching rules is added to the simulator. Besides, a statistical process control (SPC) module and a preventive maintenance (PM) module are connected to the simulator for a better monitoring. Finally, a three-tiered architecture of a remote control system is constructed for cluster tools. For the sake of concurrency and data extraction, only some important events, rather than all data are transferred to remote browsers. By the detection of the cluster tool and the diagnosis in the local controller, the maintenance engineer can monitor the efficiency and failure of the cluster tool by the remote browser. A better method is chosen from the diagnosis results and is used as the basis of online recovery, or the reference to inform related staff.