SEMI E133—The Process Control System Standard: Deriving a Software Interoperability Standard for Advanced Process Control in Semiconductor Manufacturing

The process control systems (PCS) SEMI Standard E133 facilitates the integration of PCS into current and future fabs. The standard focuses on defining the portion of ldquointerface Brdquo associated with communication with and between components of PCSs. Specifically, the scope of the standard is the functional groups of run-to-run (R2R) control, fault detection (FD), fault classification (FC), fault prediction (FP), and statistical process control (SPC). The standard specifies PCS interfaces (which utilize ldquointerface Brdquo) that will enable these functional groups to interact effectively and share data among themselves and with the other interdependent factory systems, including systems within the process equipment. Key requirements driving the standard specification include the move to service-oriented and event-driven architectures and a need to define PCS capabilities from an input/output (I/O) perspective along functional boundaries defined by commercial applications. The developed standard addresses these requirements and specifies: 1) the capabilities of all five functional groups; 2) a comprehensive I/O interface data model; 3) an XML representation of that data model (E133.1); 4) a set of common services and behavior classes; 5) extensions of the I/O structure and behavior for each functional group; and 6) an application note that provides an example of PCS integration with equipment data acquisition (EDA) data collection. XML, R2R control, and FD implementation examples illustrate that the standard addresses these requirements, with the FD example further illustrating compatibility with EDA ldquointerface Ardquo standards. The standard to date has mature R2R control and FD specifications with key PCS users and providers indicating that they are using the standard extensively.