Data processing: generic control systems or specific application – Specific application – apparatus or process – Product assembly or manufacturing
Reexamination Certificate
2002-04-23
2003-12-09
Paladini, Albert W. (Department: 2125)
Data processing: generic control systems or specific application
Specific application, apparatus or process
Product assembly or manufacturing
C700S112000, C700S169000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06662066
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to systems and methods for automating tracking and control of product fabrication machines. More particularly this invention relates to systems and methods for monitoring product fabrication rates and product fabrication machine efficiency.
2. Description of Related Art
Automated manufacturing systems have improved the productivity of manufacturing firms. The tool elements of a manufacturing system must be organized to produce the total product set that is marketed by the firm. To insure that the tool elements are used efficiently, a manufacturing execution system (MES) controls the operation of the tool elements and monitors the performance of the tool elements. Each tool element has actuators to activate the functions of the tool element and sensors to monitor the process of the tool element in performing its set of operations.
The MES environment provides the structure through which the structure, process, scheduling, and progress of a manufacturing process is defined, implemented, and executed. An industrial engineering or process engineering group defines the process or creates a recipe for a particular product to be fabricated. The definition is transmitted to the factory floor or process line where the process is implemented. Various tool elements are programmed to perform the various steps of the fabrication process and sensors within the tool elements are enabled to transfer status and tool element condition for monitoring the quality of the fabricated product.
The equipment engineering group is an engineering group within the manufacturing firm's organization responsible for the design and performance of the individual tool elements. In the design and construction of the tool elements for the process line, the equipment engineering group determines or designs the tool elements to have a particular product fabrication rate capacity. Thus a measure of the performance of each tool element and the factory floor or process line is the actual rate of product fabrication. The actual rate of product fabrication is then compared with the designed or planned fabrication to determine a tool element or process line efficiency rating.
PROMIS is an MES software suite from PRI Automation, Inc. of Billerica, Mass. that provides specialty MES solutions for the semiconductor and the precision electronics industries. The solutions include process definition, version control for manufacturing operations, and monitoring and management of the tool elements of the process line or factory floor. The monitoring and management of the tool elements includes interface to the tool element automation actuators and sensors to control the function of the tool elements of each tool element. Further, the monitoring and management includes tracking progress of work-in-process as the product is fabricated. Part of the tracking includes monitoring the conditions of each tool element as the tool element performs a particular process. This includes recording the beginning and ending times of a particular process, the transport time of the work-in-process between tool elements, and recording the time of any error or alarms when a tool element malfunctions and when the malfunction is corrected and the process resumes. Further, the monitoring includes recording the duration of any time that the tool elements are idle. The idle time includes any time that a tool element is waiting for the arrival of work-in-process from preceding tool element.
International Sematech, Inc. is a consortium of semiconductor and integrated circuit manufacturing firms that have joined their resources to advance the semiconductor and integrated circuit technology. International Sematech, Inc. has promulgated a Tool Performance Tracking Platform (TP2) that provides a standard interface for gathering tool element performance information. The TP2 program automatically measures the productive time or the time a tool element is performing a manufacturing process, the idle time (standby time) or the time the tool element is waiting to begin the next process on a work-in-process, alarm duration time (interrupt time) or the time that a tool element has an error or fault condition, and the transport time or the time the work-in-process is being moved between tool elements. The Tool Performance Tracking System further allows these times to be measured by tool element, groups of tool elements, by the process or recipe, by the individual or group (lot) of the work-in-process. These time measurements allow for the monitoring of the capacity of each tool element and for all the tool elements involved in a manufacturing process. In semiconductor processing the group of tool elements will be an individual processing chamber that will process a lot of wafers (the work-in-process).
Refer now to
FIG. 1
for a discussion of the method and system employed for measuring the capacity of manufacturing process or an individual tool element of the prior art. Each tool element
10
that is present on the factory floor is connected to the MES environment data base
20
to provide the necessary actuation and control to configure each tool element
10
to perform a series of processes as defined by the recipe or product plan upon a work-in-process to fabricate a particular product. In the case of a semiconductor fabrication line, the chambers receive a lot of wafers and perform the necessary process steps to form integrated circuits upon the surface of the wafers. Each sensor on the tool elements then provide the necessary condition and status information to allow monitoring of the progress of each process step and the time for the processing. Traditionally the check-in (begin of a process) or check-out (end of a process) time is manually extracted (Box
30
) from the MES environment database
20
. The times are collected according to a recipe and the amount of fabricated products (wafers for semiconductor processing) or lots of fabricated products processed per unit time (i.e. wafers per hour) are then calculated (Box
40
). The number of fabricated products or lots of fabricated products processed is usually termed throughput. Upon completion of the calculation of the throughput
40
the MES environment database
20
is manually updated (Box
50
). The throughput for each recipe is extracted from the MES environment database
20
and combined (Box
60
) with the frequency of use of each recipe as planned and a capacity check system report
70
is generated.
The frequency of Box
60
is the number of performances of a given process. The capacity being the amount of production of the fabrication facility. The capacity for production of the various tool elements employed in each process is then calculated to determine the capacity for the fabrication facility. By multiplying the capability of each process and the tool element used in the process times the number of times the process is executed, any bottlenecks with in the fabrication facility can be determined. Understanding the capacity capabilities of the fabrication facility allows verification for planned future production.
The capacity of the factory floor or manufacturing process line is compared (Box
80
) with the planned capacity to determine the efficiency of the factory floor or manufacturing process line. The extracting (Box
30
), calculating the throughput (Box
40
), and the updating (Box
50
) MES environment database
20
is time consuming and manually intensive and thus cannot be performed and adjusted on a continuous basis.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,163,761 (Kent) describes a method and system for monitoring and controlling factory production. The method and system are capable of handling dynamic process production data. The electronic production system includes a memory; an input/output interface for receiving production data from a plurality of sensors detecting operation of a plurality of processes for a facility; and a processor. The processor includes a plurality of dynamically operating software modules, each resp
Cheng Ni Chung
Suen Lin Jia
Yu Lin Chien
Ackerman Stephen B.
Knowles Billy
Paladini Albert W.
Saile George O.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company
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