Design and Development of Component-based Equipment Connectivity for Semiconductor Manufacturing

In the Semiconductor Industry, the communication between a host application and equipment is performed using some standardized communication protocols, such as SECS I, SECS II, or GEM. However, specific equipment requirements and proprietary messages frequently make the equipment connectivity non-interoperable. By taking advantage of component software computing technology, a generic equipment integration interface called Component-based Equipment Connectivity (CEC) is proposed. CEC is designed as an assemblage of various customizable components, such as communication, message/control, and data repository. When these components are instantiated with equipment-dependent parameters, an operational CEC can be created for a specific type of GEM-compliant semiconductor equipment. Using XML as the data representation vehicle, communicated messages become language/platform independent and ease of integration is promoted.