Smart Manufacturing

Automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and their direct suppliers of parts and systems share a vision: Next-generation vehicles will be more electric, autonomous and connected. At a market size of more than $1 trillion, automotive is steadily becoming a high-tech market as cars morph into advanced technology platforms with partially or fully autonomous features. Call them semiconductors on wheels. Big players such as Google and many carmakers are investing heavily in chip advances to help drive increases in silicon content in automobiles.At SEMICON Europa, Pierrick Boulay, Solid State Lighting and Lighting Systems analyst at Yole Développement, will provide a market update on autonomous automobile trends including the state of sensors, radars, cameras and LiDARs as the industry works to increase the level of autonomy and electrification.Autonomous vehicle design can only thrive with the development of an industry standard for chip and device traceability across the supply chain. The importance of chip traceability to the automotive industry is reflected in its central role in driving a chip traceability standard.According to Heidi Hoffman, senior director of technology communities marketing at SEMI, “chip traceability is one of the next big things for the technology industry. The benefits are enormous, and the upsides – including yield enhancements, counterfeiting safeguards, and support for new applications – are plentiful. But the implementation challenges of chip traceability are also big and will require considerable effort to overcome. The biggest hurdle of all? We need to transcend industry fears by demonstrating that we can secure IP when it is shared across the hardware supply chain.” The Importance of Standards, Data Collection and Collaboration Across the Supply ChainThe automotive industry has long embraced tracing the sources of defects. Now, as the automotive and semiconductor supply chains increasingly overlap, traceability has taken on greater importance in the semiconductor industry. SEMI committees, task forces and events such as the Smart Transportation Forum at SEMICON Europa are ideal platforms for collaborating to develop new standards and best practices for the automotive industry.Earlier this year, German luxury automobile maker Audi AG became the first automotive original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to join SEMI as member, strengthening alignment across automotive supply-chain segments. At SEMICON Europa, the SMART Transportation Forum and Pavilion, staged by the SEMI Global Automotive Advisory Council (GAAC) and bolstered by the Electronic System Design Alliance, a SEMI Strategic Association Partner, will gather key stakeholders across the automotive value chain, from design and semiconductor equipment to materials and carmakers, to explore innovation opportunities in automotive electronics. SEMI Global Automotive Advisory Council (GAAC) “If the industry wants to reach the goal of zero defects, a new collaborative approach is necessary,” observed Antoine Amade, senior regional director EMEA at Entegris. At SEMICON Europa, Amade will present new ways to collaborate in reducing chip defectivity and meet other challenges in the automotive industry.More than half of semiconductor failures on the automotive assembly line today (so-called 0km failures) are traced to semiconductor fab defectivity. “The increasing semiconductor content in automobiles – driven by growth in ADAS, electrification and autonomy – has put a growing focus on the quality and reliability of these devices and their implications for consumer safety and satisfaction,” said Oreste Donzella, senior vice president and CMO at KLA.The smart manufacturing (Industry 4.0) revolution is already spurring higher performance and great efficiencies throughout the supply chain and will also be crucial to driving innovation in automotive. Smart manufacturing makes possible significant improvements in factory key performance indicators (KPI) for cycle time, on-time delivery, overall equipment effectiveness, cost and product quality.“These KPI gains are key to meeting quality levels the automotive industry must reach to support the deployment of autonomous driving vehicles,” said John R. Behnke, general manager of Final Phase Systems at INFICON. In his talk at SEMICON Europa, Behnke will provide an overview of existing, in-progress, and future smart manufacturing solutions for the semiconductor industry and their impact on the automotive supply chain. The SMART Transportation Forum, 13 November, 2019 (9:30-15:30 at ICM Munich, room 14c) at SEMICON Europa is the premier platform for key stakeholders to connect, collaborate and innovate across the automotive value chain. Automotive and semiconductor industry experts will offer insights into trends in design, semiconductor equipment and materials, and automotive innovation and the roadmap to 2030. The SMART Transportation Forum will also showcase innovations in imaging, sensing, artificial intelligence (AI), smart manufacturing and L5 mobility.Other SEMICON Europa highlights: Advanced Packaging Conference: Packaging and Test Challenges Towards High Reliability (12-13 November 2019) 23rd Fab Management Forum: Game Changers for Semiconductor Operations(11-12 November 2019) Strategic Materials Conference: Strategic Materials Enabling Industry Roadmaps(12-13 November 2019) SEMICON Europa registration is open for visitors and exhibitors. For more details, please visit the SEMICON Europa website and connect with SEMI Europe on Twitter or LinkedIn @SEMIEurope (use #SEMICONEuropa).Learn more about the SEMI chip traceability standard – SEMI T23 - Specification for Single Device Traceability for the Supply Chain – and SEMI Technology Communities.Serena Brischetto is a marketing and communications manager at SEMI Europe.

Imagine a world where there are chips in about everything we touch on a daily basis. It is not hard to do with semiconductors already at the core of many leading-edge electronic devices. These sophisticated chips are hidden from sight, but their functions are vitally significant to our daily lives.Manufactured in multibillion-dollar facilities, the production process of chips is one of the riskiest, costliest, and most technically complex feats in business. Consider the difficulties of managing contaminants during device manufacturing: A single speck of dust on a lens could cause the entire output of the plant to be scrapped.For years, these exotic fabrication facilities, called fabs, have been packing more efficiency into ever smaller chips. As new technologies continue to emerge, chip manufacturers face constant pressure to continually refine and improve their operations to meet the challenge of rising device performance and yield goals. Fab managers must optimize tool performance, improve fabrication techniques, safely handle toxic materials and design better integration flows. Layer on top of those requirements customer demand for greater innovation and quality of service, it can be difficult for manufacturers to handle everything on their own while consistently meeting necessary requirements.Align for CollaborationWith the help of the Fab Owners Alliance (FOA), a SEMI technology community, manufacturers and their suppliers don’t have to travel this road alone. Membership in this international group allows semiconductor and MEMS fab managers and industry suppliers to come together to solve common non-competitive manufacturing issues and improve business results.Founded in 2004, the group consists of 25+ device manufacturers (DMs) with over 120 semiconductor manufacturing facilities and 60+ solution providers (SPs) who supply equipment and services. Through quarterly meetings, study teams, benchmarking surveys, case studies and online forums, FOA successfully provides a collaborative, non-competitive platform to the fab management and operations community. FOA members enjoying an engaging discussion and networking event during the recent Q1 2019 Collaborative Forum at the Double Tree Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona One of the most popular FOA platforms is the annual Collaborative Forum early in the year. The goal is to bring together DMs and SPs from around the world for an open dialogue under one roof. For two days, they share success stories and discuss issues facing their fabs and the industry in general and develop collective strategies to address them.The success stories are particularly engaging as they accentuate the value and benefits of FOA membership. Presented as case studies, these stories outline how the DMs and SPs work together to improve fab efficiency and increase yields. Often, the ideas for the case studies are conceived during networking events, fab tours and programs organized by the FOA.The case studies shared at the 2019 Collaborative Forum, held at the Double Tree Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona, February 13-14, 2019, illustrate the power of collaboration within the FOA. Following are a few examples.Scheduling System Implementation Broadcom was facing a steep ramp when it decided to engage with FPS, an INFICON product line. In addition, the manual decision making, and limited real-time visibility of factory data was negatively impacting their production in its 150mm and 200mm environment. By deploying an integrated Smart Manufacturing software solution and its digital twin, FPS was able to retrofit Broadcom’s manual factory with automated decision-making capabilities.This solution offered many benefits. Constraint tool utilization increased by more than 15 percent. The automated WIP management system also eliminated many manual wafer handling issues such as lost lots, WIP storage constraints, building transfers, and time spent looking for lots. Pushing Tool Performance BoundariesAs tools in the 200mm space are hard to find, GLOBALFOUNDRIES is always looking to squeeze every wafer out of its existing resources. To drive continuous improvement and increase equipment throughput, GLOBALFOUNDRIES leveraged MAX’s knowledge with Machine Rate Models. Together, they were able to employ a modelling technique that helped them model key toolsets and develop actions to increase intrinsic machine rate performance.Based on this knowledge, 10 capacity constraints were selected, and speed models were developed for all of them. This win-win collaboration allowed GLOBALFOUNDRIES to find some real opportunities that translated into CAPEX and cost savings. On average, the companies identified a 12 percent potential improvement opportunity per toolset and created engineering task force teams to prioritize and drive the improvements.Simplifying the Chamber Matching Process Using Trace AnalyticsThe collaboration between NXP and BISTel resulted from a shared vision of achieving Smart Manufacturing using analytic solutions enabled by artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies. Chamber matching is critical in identifying process variation to ensure manufacturing quality. Traditional tools like Fault Detection Classification (FDC) often do not provide clear enough insights to pinpoint the issues and require extensive time to collect data from each chamber.Through several use cases, NXP and BISTel successfully illustrated the effectiveness of using a trace analytic solution to quickly and accurately quantify and monitor chamber-to-chamber mismatches as well as changes within a chamber over time. The full trace analyses of all parameters allowed NXP to generate better FDC models to more quickly detect similar issues in the future. In addition, NXP was able to identify the cause of a parametric shift by comparing performance of the same chamber between two different time periods. All in all, the trace analytics solution brought together and analyzed the process data efficiently, thereby reducing analysis time from days to minutes.Eagleview Inspection of SiC and Transparent Wafers X-FAB challenged Microtronic to develop a new capability for its high-throughput recipe-less macro defect inspection systems. Microtronic’s EagleView machine vision macro defect inspection system is well known for its versatility in the semiconductor industry due to its wide deployment as well as its recognition as winner of the 2017 Best of West Award at SEMICON West. But X-FAB’s requirements to inspect and image transparent wafer substrates were novel. After working closely to understand X-FAB’s needs, Microtronic made extensive hardware and software enhancements to enable high-throughput macro inspection of Silicon Carbide (SiC) and other transparent wafer substrates.Get InvolvedThe FOA meetings are held at device manufacturing sites twice a year. The next meeting will be graciously hosted by MACOM in Lowell, Massachusetts, May 22-23, 2019. The DMs and SPs will meet again at SEMICON West at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on July 11, 2019.To attend these meeting and be part of this high-impact group, please email us at [email protected]. For more information about FOA, please visit our website.Nishita Rao is a marketing manager at SEMI.

Semiconductor, electronics and equipment manufacturers today face a number of logistics and supply chain challenges that could be overcome by systems providing a secure, tamper-resistant, single source of truth. Chief among these challenges is limited data sharing due to data security barriers among suppliers, shippers, manufacturers and test houses, an impediment to achieving optimal product quality and regulatory compliance. Additionally, inefficient and inadequate processes for tracking goods make it more difficult to isolate shipping problems, track faulty parts and verify product authenticity. Counterfeiting has become a serious problem that costs US-based semiconductor manufacturers $7.5 billion annually.How Blockchain Can Help Clear Data Sharing BottlenecksBlockchain functions could help alleviate many data sharing pain points in manufacturing. Blockchain’s distributed functionality, bundled security measures, and associated features such as smart contracts have the potential to help manufacturers quickly trace goods, manage records transparently, and automate supply chain processes and payments. No isolated blockchain platform would solve all of these problems on its own. But, when combined with other solutions and applied to particular use cases, blockchain has the potential to optimize operations and foster an environment of trust and collaboration among consortium members. Three core features of blockchain make it a valuable technology for manufacturing: Distributed and immutable system of record. With a distributed system of record in the blockchain network, there is no "central" data store controlled by one organization. The distributed ledger provides all participants with a view into the data, thus increasing transparency, data distribution timeliness, information sharing, and data access. Security also improves as there is no single central data store open to external attacks. Once data is inserted onto the chain, it cannot be easily changed. Security and Trust. Blockchain integrates best-of-breed cryptographic mechanisms to guarantee the digital identity of the network participants and secure the privacy of the data stored to enable role-based data access. It brings trust to a potentially trustless environment without the need for a centralized third party. Smart Contracts. Smart contracts are embedded business logic that can be added to a blockchain. They enable the automation of many processes and the secure handling of contracts. Blockchain Use Cases in ManufacturingIn each stage of manufacturing, blockchain could be applied in a variety of use cases to expedite processes and alleviate security issues. A few examples that merely scratch the surface of what may be possible follow.In pre-production, manufacturers may implement blockchain solutions for Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR). These systems monitor inventory levels, enabling suppliers to replenish supplies before they run low. The expensive, proprietary B2B networks used today could be replaced with blockchain as the common sharing protocol, using non-proprietary or public networks.Suppliers may also combine blockchain with IoT sensors on shipping containers to provide a tamper-resistant record of shipping conditions. This could be used to ensure that temperature and humidity tolerances for chemicals and equipment are not exceeded during transit from the supplier. The identity and materials in components and subcomponents of manufacturing equipment could be collected on a blockchain to verify compliance with environmental and health regulations. During production, a manufacturing process machine can be registered on a blockchain with a unique identity; its performance and maintenance history can be recorded. A maintenance service provider could then be automatically notified, via a smart contract, when a predictive maintenance alert is written, allowing repair of machines before they fail. In the distribution stage, customers could search the ledger for a product’s complete history, reducing counterfeiting and solidifying the origin of properly sourced goods. When faulty product is identified, the manufacturer may search the ledger to quickly locate the faulty supplier or bad test results and alert all receivers of the defective product.ConclusionWith blockchain, manufacturing can become a more collaborative process among suppliers, manufacturers and customers. Blockchain can help streamline the supply chain and inventory replenishment, improve tracking and regulatory compliance, and reduce counterfeiting. Augmenting blockchain with IoT enables use cases like predictive maintenance and monitoring of goods during transit. Blockchain is not yet mature and its business value still needs to be proven. However, it is poised to help manufacturers decrease costs and fraud, and provide customers with faster, more secure delivery, increased visibility, and consistency.More Resources on Blockchain and ManufacturingTibco is an active member of SEMI’s Smart Manufacturing Technology Community, which holds regular meetings on this and other topics. Join now to help shape the future of Smart Manufacturing. For more information on blockchain use cases in manufacturing, please see these resources. Read this Whitepaper: Blockchain and Manufacturing: A Match Made in the Factory Watch this Webinar: Blockchain and Manufacturing - A Match Made in the Factory Visit the TIBCO Blockchain Solutions page Mike Alperin is a TIBCO principal manufacturing industry consultant embedded in the Data Science team where he applies analytics, machine learning and big data technology to current industry problems. Prior to this he was the product manager for a leading commercial yield management application. He has worked at start-ups and global semiconductor manufacturing companies as a yield manager, device engineer, process engineer and failure analyst. Mike is based in Austin, Texas.

OSATs (outsourced assembly and test companies) currently handle the bulk of assembly and test activity for the worldwide semiconductor industry. These companies’ factories have a manual operation legacy: Decision-making is manual. Materials and WIP (work in process) movement is manual. Practically everything in these factories is done manually. In addition, OSAT factory environments typically present many physical constraints with respect to equipment layout, material carriers and storage. All of these constraints present challenges when trying to automate material handling in these factories. OSATs also operate with far smaller gross and operating profit margins than IDMs, yet the percentage of worldwide semiconductor product handled by OSATs is currently increasing from year to year while the IDM share is decreasing. The combination of increased business volume with lower margins encourages OSATs to automate their factories, but there are challenges that must be overcome. Technical challenges abound OSATs face many technical challenges when trying to automate production. First, installed legacy equipment in these factories is typically 25 to 30 years old. This older equipment was simply not designed to accommodate automated materials handlers. For example, access doors on older equipment make automated WIP delivery and pickup nearly impossible without significant modifications to the equipment. Second, these factories are not equipped with the infrastructure needed to support automation. To start with, most of this older equipment is not SECS/GEM compliant. (SECS/GEM is the semiconductor industry's standard equipment interface protocol for equipment-to-host data communications.) This capability must either be retrofitted to the existing equipment or some other means of extracting required data from the equipment – getting it from the PLCs controlling the equipment, for example – must be employed. Similarly, the WIP carriers currently in use – wafer carriers, trays, magazines, and the like – are not designed for automation. In contrast to the semiconductor wafer fab industry, it seems that almost every company in the OSAT domain has a different idea concerning what a carrier should look like. In particular, there’s no such thing as the standard 300mm FOUP (Front Opening Unified Pod), which carries wafers from one tool to the next inside of semiconductor fabs. The variations in carrier shapes, configurations, and even gripping handles in the OSAT domain thwarts progress in OSAT factory automation. How do you design a materials-handling robot with the grippers and flexibility needed to adapt to all of these different carriers? It’s a difficult question and an expensive proposition. OSAT facilities themselves are designed for human-based materials handling, not automated materials handling, simply because they were designed at a time when automation was not contemplated. As a result, the equipment in these facilities is packed very closely together (to reduce floor space costs), as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: Equipment in a test facility is often tightly packed, which impedes the adoption of automated materials handling. It’s very difficult to add automated materials handling equipment at floor level or even at ceiling level in these OSAT factories, as is frequently done inside of a semiconductor wafer fab. You will not see AGVs (automated guided vehicles) moving around inside of legacy OSAT factories because there’s simply no room for them to move around. Tackling the challenges So, what can be done to handle these all of challenges? You must start by understanding the nature of the operations taking place inside of the factory. As stated above, most of these operations are currently performed manually. All of the decisions and the materials transport is performed by humans. There’s simply no way to transition from a fully manual operation to a fully automated operation in one jump. It’s too far a reach. A significant amount of work is needed just to reach the level where automated decision making is possible. Key systems must be added to enable this level of automation. Many companies tried and failed to automate assembly and test in OSAT facilities about 25 years ago. They failed because the required data could not be extracted from the equipment in use and, therefore, there was no data to drive good decision-making. Too many required systems were simply lacking. For example, when AGVs were added, one or two operators had to walk along with the AGV to tell it what to do. There was no benefit from the automation in this example. There was no successful path to automation at the time. Standards needed One of the major obstacles to automating assembly and test in OSAT facilities is a lack of standards for carriers, robotics, layout, and facilities. Many front-end standards exist. The SEMI-E82, SEMI-E84, and SEMI-E88 standards designed for semiconductor fab front ends might apply, but they need to be adapted to requirements for OSAT back-end facilities. In addition, OSATs have special needs that may demand new standards. This is a real opportunity for SEMI and its constituents. An architecture for full assembly and test automation involves four layers, as shown in Figure 2. Figure 2: Full automation for assembly and test involves four layers. Starting with the data layer at the top of Figure 2, a fully automated facility needs to have database systems in place that can supply all of the data needed for making smart scheduling and dispatch decisions. These databases then feed smart, automated scheduling and dispatch applications in the logic layer. The scheduling and dispatch applications then send control commands to the automated transport and materials controllers and the automated equipment handlers in the control layer. You need to start at the top of the diagram to put all of this automation in place. The automated equipment and equipment controllers need commands from the scheduling and dispatch applications, which in turn need data from the databases to make smart decisions. So it’s the data layer and the systems that feed data to this layer that constitute the starting point for the journey to full automation. A significant amount of simulation is needed to develop optimal facility workflows. These simulations are driven by data extracted from the databases. One of the frequently ignored facets of automation is the need for backup plans. For example, what is the backup plan when an AGV fails and cannot deliver material as scheduled? Simulation helps create contingency plans for such events. A case study Applied Materials has worked with assembly and test factories in deploying full automation. Towards this objective, the factories have worked on many modifications (physical and systems) to enable this automation. For example, a die-attach machine was retrofitted for automation by removing all of its equipment doors so that an AGV could load the machine and extract completed work. Additional modifications permitted the mounting of multiple magazines on the die-attach machine’s input and output to provide the buffering needed to smooth the flow of work through the machine. Finally, simple instrumentation and networking was added to the machine to aid in making WIP delivery and pickup decisions. These machine modifications addressed only the bottlenecks in this particular machine, but even these simple modifications helped to reduce the incidence of manual handling errors, such as the misalignment of magazines or trays. Modifications like these also reduce the need for human operators, which in turn reduces operating costs. Such types of incremental enhancements in automation capability have been implemented by leading-edge companies over the past few years. Conclusion Deploying full automation for assembly and test is not only feasible, it’s necessary for future profitability. OSATs must address the challenges of rising manufacturing volumes and thin margins by reducing manufacturing errors and increasing quality. (The quality requirement is increasingly driven by the automotive industry.) Trailblazing deployments have shown that it’s possible to automate these manufacturing lines successfully. While IDMs have a longer history for manufacturing automation, OSATs are now traveling along the same path due to their rising share of worldwide manufacturing volumes. On that path, they’ll need to develop experience and new standards tailored to their unique needs. Shekar Krishnaswamy is a senior manager at Applied Materials responsible for business development and pre-sales of factory automation products and solutions. He has over 27 years of experience in all aspects of semiconductor manufacturing including wafer fab manufacturing, bump, assembly and test. His specific areas of expertise are traditional industrial engineering methods as well as systems-related methodologies such as modeling, scheduling, dispatching and factory automation. Prior to Applied Materials, Shekar held senior technical and management positions at IBM, Motorola and AMD, including management of corporate operations research departments supporting factory and service groups. Shekar has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s degree in industrial engineering and operations research. Note: SEMI has a Smart Manufacturing Technology Community. For more information or to get involved, click here.

Last year the industry posted another remarkable double-digit revenue growth year. IC shipments eclipsed one trillion units for the first time and continued to enable an ever-expanding array of silicon intensive-applications.2018 was also a pivotal year of transformation at SEMI. Setting our sights firmly on building more value for SEMI members, we doubled down on priorities I established this time last year. We advocated intensively on global trade policies, industry talent needs, and critical environment, health and safety (EHS) concerns. To underpin our efforts around talent, we took the bold step to reinvigorate the industry’s identity with a dynamic image campaign. Above all, we targeted critical industry-wide issues to help us realize the ambition of becoming a trillion-dollar industry in the next decade. Workforce DevelopmentRedefining our approach to talent development in 2018 was and remains a top priority. A diverse, highly skilled workforce is crucial to the industry’s ability to innovate. Last year we ramped up a number of SEMI High Tech U (HTU) programs to inspire young people and attract them to careers in high-tech manufacturing. To date, more than 130,000 students have been touched by HTU – through student or teacher programs.Over the past year, we designed a new university outreach program and established partnerships with 100 institutions. We established Workforce Pavilions at SEMICON events in Southeast Asia, the U.S., Taiwan, Europe and Japan for students to explore career opportunities and meet with recruiters. We thrilled at seeing sponsors hire young talent at SEMI events. This year, all SEMICONs worldwide will feature Workforce Pavilions.SEMI also formalized its commitment to Diversity and Inclusion (D I) with the establishment of a D I council to shape new programs including the recently launched Spotlight on SEMI Women. To localize and fully optimize our D I programs, we established regional workforce councils in every region we serve. We unveiled the SEMI Mentoring Program to support students and young professionals on this journey by facilitating one-on-one mentoring relationships with industry professionals. Hundreds of mentees have enrolled. But we still need more mentors. I urge you to join the program. During the year, SEMI also expanded its workforce staff and developed a comprehensive workforce strategy with programs that engage students as early as elementary school and inspires them through high school and college. The program provides pathways to professional careers, building a pipeline to fill the short-term and long-term talent needs of the industry. Industry Image CampaignAs we developed the comprehensive workforce development program, we knew we had to refresh the industry’s image and appeal to the next generation through contemporary media and communications channels. So we recently launched a bold, innovative campaign to raise industry awareness and attract students and recent graduates to careers in semiconductor manufacturing.Our You’re Welcome campaign is a novel, creative approach that blends entertainment, media and storytelling to excite students about the industry. The campaign went viral immediately and within weeks had more than 5.5 million social media impressions and 2.3 million video views.Trade Policy AdvocacyRising trade tensions between the U.S. and China catapulted global trade policy to the forefront of industry concerns in 2018. Since the tariffs have taken force, semiconductor companies have faced higher costs, greater uncertainty, and difficulty selling products abroad. The tariffs have forced many SEMI member companies to pause or rethink their investment strategies.SEMI quickly engaged U.S. policymakers and provided resources for SEMI members. We formed a member trade task force, staged trade compliance seminars in China, and convened meetings with over 110 U.S. congressional, agency and administration officials, and provided testimony on the importance of the free trade to the industry.SEMI continues to educate policymakers about the critical importance of free and fair trade, open markets, and respect and enforcement of IP for all players in the global electronics manufacturing supply chain. As part of this initiative, we distributed “10 Principles for the Global Semiconductor Supply Chain in Modern Trade Agreements” and encouraged their adoption in various trade negotiations. These principles outline the primary considerations for balanced trade rules that benefit SEMI members around the world, strengthen innovation and perpetuate the societal benefits of affordable microelectronics.Environment, Health and SafetyEnvironmental regulations are proliferating globally even as advanced semiconductor manufacturing technology relies increasingly on a host of new materials. With dozens of new fabs and fab line upgrades, our industry must align on best practices, sensibly respond to materials restrictions, and renew efforts toward sustainable manufacturing.That’s why the revitalization of SEMI EHS efforts became another priority in 2018. Two months ago, we hosted the inaugural EHS Summit at SEMI Headquarters. Fully, 70 EHS professionals and company executives met to form the basis for the future SEMI EHS program.The Year AheadDespite a softening in the market, compounded by Apple’s first-ever announcement of a revenue decline in 16 years, a geopolitical whirlwind on trade and an extended shutdown of much of the U.S. government, the future is bright.At SEMI’s annual Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS 2019) in Half Moon Bay, Calif. in early January, the sense of optimism was palpable. In her keynote address, Dr. Ann Kelleher, Sr. VP and General Manager, Technology and Manufacturing Group, at Intel, observed that data is powering the fourth industry revolution and the expansion of compute. With customers expecting continual improvements in applications, Kelleher highlighted the tremendous opportunity for the chip industry to meet these expectations.At ISS 2019, we announced a Memorandum of Understand between SEMI and imec. The MOU will enable us to accelerate our members’ engagement in SEMI’s Smart vertical market platforms, in particular Smart MedTech and Smart Transportation. Our partnership with imec will also allow us to boost SEMI Standards activities in non-CMOS technologies, deepen technology roadmap efforts and augment our SEMI Think Tank initiative in thought leadership at a global level.Over the course of this coming year, will we begin our global rollout of key building blocks of our comprehensive workforce development program to engage schoolchildren as young as 10 and learners all the way to veterans who return to the workforce. We are now able, with the invaluable help of our Workforce Development Council and the passionate engagement of many SEMI member companies, to offer a solution to the talent crisis in our industry.We will continue to be the leading voice for our members and the end-to-end semiconductor supply chain across Talent, Trade, Tax and Technology as we work to ensure free, fair trade that protects IP while preserving vital access to markets to grow the supply chain. Vertical Market PlatformsOur vertical market platforms are an important part of this growth. For example, in Smart MedTech, SEMI looks forward to working with the Nano-Bio Materials Consortium to advance human monitoring technology for telemedicine and digital health after winning $7 million to fund the renewed program. In Smart Transportation, we will leverage the Global Automotive Advisory Council (GAAC) we formed last year to represent the full automotive supply chain and the Smart Transportation and Smart Automotive forums featured at all our SEMICON events to enable the industry to identify and seize opportunities in autonomous driving. At ISS 2019, Sujeet Chand of Rockwell Automation noted that “digitization will grow faster in the next 10 years than it did in the past 50,” a trend calling for semiconductor fab architectures that transform data into business value. We will continue to bring the industry together at our Smart Manufacturing venues to help uncover ways to deploy deep learning, edge computing and other Smart technologies to deliver this value and meet the challenges of automation as artificial intelligence’s (AI) sprawling influence reshapes industries including manufacturing.I am filled with optimism and thrilled about the opportunities I see on the horizon for our members as we build on our 2018 accomplishments to enable your prosperity in 2019 and beyond. My heartfelt thanks to all of you for your participation in our programs and events.I look forward to another successful year as we connect, collaborate and innovate together!Ajit Manocha is president and CEO of SEMI.

We are living in a digital world where semiconductors are taken for granted, AI is bringing semiconductors back into the deserved spotlight, and now we are witnessing the dawn of the Cognitive Era enabled by semiconductors,” SEMI president and CEO Ajit Manocha said to an audience of more than 500 during his presentation – Rebirth of the Semiconductor Industry – at the First Global IC Entrepreneur Conference.Speaking at the Shanghai event in mid-December, Manocha recalled how, when he first entered the semiconductor industry in the 1980s, semiconductors revenue topped out at about $10 billion. Now, with sales having swelled to a staggering $450 billion, the industry is on a much faster growth track. Revenue could reach $500 billion by the end of 2020 and trillions of dollars by 2030. Over the past two decades, chips have given rise to social media and e-commerce powerhouses such as Google, Facebook, and Alibaba. All rely on heavily on chips, the engines of data centers across all industries. Wave after wave of technology innovation have been powered by semiconductors – from mainframe computers in the 1970s, personal computers in the 1980s, the Internet in the 1990s, and mobile and social networking in the early 20th century, to the current shining stars of technology such as IoT, big data, new memory, virtual reality, autonomous driving and artificial intelligence, Manocha said. New applications across areas such as smart manufacturing and digital healthcare are stoking the latest round of semiconductor growth.The rise of AI, like all the technologies before it, has renewed the semiconductor industry once again with its promise to drive growth of all industries worldwide, Manocha said. Five years ago, IoT was but a gleam in a technologist’s eye, more hype than reality with doubt about its viability running deep. Today, with about 60 percent of people in the world connected to the Internet, the enormous promise and potential of IoT is flowering. Industry growth will explode as the melding of AI and IoT birth countless applications and innovations in SMART transportation (0 emissions; 0 fatalities; 0 congestion), smart sensors (agriculture, infrastructure, healthcare) and SMART “Everything” (people, devices, homes, cities, industries, and the list goes on). Indeed, AI is now widely recognized as a chief growth driver of the semiconductor industry well into the future, with semiconductor technology at the core of AI innovation, he said. Semiconductors are thrusting the fifth industrial revolution into the fast lane. China’s much-anticipated rise as an industry powerhouse over the next few years will only accelerate industry growth, turning current disruptions into future opportunities as SEMI China continues to cultivate connection, collaboration and innovation in China’s fast-growing semiconductor sector.Cherry Sun is a marketing manager at SEMI China.

Semiconductor fabs have been getting smarter and smarter over the past 30 years. It’s a natural evolution – the direct outcome of numerous continuous-improvement efforts. The really important difference on the road to smarter fabs, the one change that’s enabling the Industry 4.0 revolution, is the concept of a cyber-physical system or digital twin. If you don’t have a thorough, detailed, high-fidelity digital twin of your entire fab operation, then you cannot have “Smart Manufacturing.” That’s really the definition of a smart site. A digital twin is simply a requirement for all smart factories of the future. One caveat: No matter what you build today from a smart perspective, your digital twin’s fidelity will improve over the next 20 years. A factory’s digital twin has two facets: the operational aspect and the yield aspect. Each of these two facets places different requirements on a database including the types of data, the frequency of data generated, the retention of data, and even the AI/ML techniques used to analyze the data. A combination of these data requirements are needed to create a digital twin – the virtual representation of your entire factory operation, whether it’s on the wafer-fab front end or the assembly and test back end. What’s most important here is that facility-wide data sets and databases must be able to communicate with each other using refined summary statistics to create a practical digital twin. For example, a lot of information is collected on the yield side to feed the deep-learning models needed to manage processes. However, the factory scheduler, driven largely by the smart operational database, needs only summary statistics from the yield database to be able to act in the next moment or over the next 24 hours. Figure 1 illustrates the needs of and the interaction between a smart operational and a yield database. Figure 1: The Operational and Yield databases in a Smart Factory need to exchange summary statistics. Today, we find that although these databases generally speak to each other in smart factories, they’re still not sufficiently connected to permit the use and analysis of data needed to realize the full potential of a smart factory. That level of interconnectedness is still in the future. Some solution providers have created what is essentially a “smart learning warehouse” (“database” has become too limited a term here). This warehouse collects, analyzes and learns from the extensive amount of information that a fab generates. Game-changing, more holistic applications become possible when this information can be combined in new and informative ways. As it turns out, a data source is just a data source, but users in different factory areas need to extract different information from these common data sources. They need different applications and portals – in other words “views” – that are adapted and adjusted for each area’s needs. Aren’t we smart enough? Some people think that 300mm fabs are already smart. That’s true. They are. But, they could be a lot smarter. No 300mm fab in use today has attained the full, utopian vision of what a smart factory can deliver over the next 10 years. When you finally integrate all of the disparate databases in a fab – when you’re able to use all of those different data sources as one common data source – that’s when your Smart Factory will have the ability to self-optimize its future actions and react quickly to real-time events. The largest semiconductor manufacturers tend to develop these smart factory applications on their own. The remaining semiconductor fabs need to work together with other fabs and their solution providers to develop these smart factory applications. Why now? Why is everyone talking about “Smart” now? It’s because the semiconductor industry has helped to create all of the enabling technology: the compute power, the networking and networking standards, and even the industry’s maturation into a multi-tiered organization of solution providers. We’ve reached the point where we can collect data from a widespread sensor network along with tool-health data and we can then warehouse this data so that it can be applied to more intelligent decision-making. While there may be one or two sensors on a tool today, in the future there will be many such sensors connected over an IoT network or networks that provide mountains of data to the warehouse. All of this data will feed into the digital-twin version of the fab. One of the biggest changes on the horizon made possible by all of this accessible data is advanced scheduling. Despite all of the automation advancements made over the past 25 years, including robotic handling, it’s still hard to decide “where, what, and when?” for every single lot in the factory. Today, no factory in the world is more complex than a semiconductor fab. Optimizing a semiconductor manufacturing process is the most complex manufacturing-optimization task in the world. Do it for ROI ROI is the chief reason for having a digital twin. Once you can make a truly smart, holistic schedule of the fabs operations — not a dispatch or rule-based dispatch list — then you can create an operationally smart factory. Rule-based dispatching systems primarily focus on tools and tool-centric views. Although they incorporate knowledge from current WIP and tool conditions to make decisions better than simple dispatch systems, smart factories are not just about tools and the current WIP at them. Smart factories use the status of every tool and lot in the factory to make fab-centric optimizations instead of tool-specific optimizations. Once you have a digital twin, you’re optimizing for global functions such as line linearity and on-time delivery. These functions are not just about the moment. The transition to a smart factory thus represents a huge philosophical change. When you know exactly what’s going to happen in a factory over the next 12 hours for every single lot, every single wafer carrier, and every single entrance port of every tool in the factory, then you suddenly have control over the factory’s idle time. You know when you can optimally perform PM (preventive maintenance). You know how to best redirect material or labor resources to maximize output. You can create a smart schedule for every maintenance person in the factory that comprehends each person’s skill set and tool downtime so that there’s no negative impact on the factory’s productivity. You can only do all of this when you know the future. Figure 2 illustrates the opportunity. Imagine that a factory contains 1,500 tools. Use of these tools is scheduled for the next twelve hours. The information depicted in Figure 2 encompasses process changes from one chemistry to another, implant changes, reticle changes, and the status of every single consumable for all 1,500 tools. The white spaces that appear between processes in Figure 2 represent opportunities to intelligently schedule events such as maintenance to maximize factory productivity. Figure 2: Smart scheduling permits factory-wide optimization to maximize productivity. Once you have a schedule, you need to translate that schedule into actions or movement. It’s not easy to do this and most material-control systems today make overly simplistic decisions based on modeled assumptions and typical cases rather than the actual time each lot needs to be at a precise location, which can only come from a schedule. Once the data from all of the tools is connected, a smart scheduling system can use the digital twin to make far better process decisions. The larger the factory (or more complex the factory), the more important it is to make smarter decisions. Note: SEMI has a Smart Manufacturing Technology Community. For more information or to get involved, click here. If you would like to discuss Smart Manufacturing more with John directly, he can be contacted at [email protected]. John Behnke is general manager of the Final Phase Systems product line at INFICON.

Even for someone who has been in this industry since the days of the TI Datamath 4-function calculator and the TMS1100 4-bit microcontroller (yes, that’s been a LONG time – the movie Grease premiered the same year!), it is sometimes hard to grasp the scope and complexity of what happens in today’s leading-edge semiconductor gigafabs. In fact, the only way to comprehend the enormous volume of transactions that occur is to consider what happens in a single minute – this is illustrated in the infographic we have labeled “The Gigafab Minute.”* It’s amazing enough to think that a single factory can start 100,000 wafers every month on their cyclical journey through 1500 process steps… and have 99%+ of them emerge 4 months later to be delivered to packaging houses and then on to waiting customers. It’s quite another to realize that all of this happens continuously (24 x 7) and automatically. “How is this possible?” you ask.Well, a big part of the solution is the body of SEMI standards which have evolved since the early 80s to keep pace with the ever-changing demands of the industry. From an automation standpoint, many of these standards deal with the communications between manufacturing equipment and the factory information and control systems that are essential for managing these complex, hyper-competitive global enterprises.A significant characteristic of these standards is that they have been carefully designed to be “additive.” This means that new generations of SEMI’s communications standards do not supplant or obsolete the previous generations, but rather provide new capabilities in an incremental fashion. To appreciate the importance of this in actual practice, consider how the GEM, GEM300, and EDA/Interface A standards support the transactions that occur in a single Gigafab Minute.Starting at 1:00 o’clock on the infographic and moving clockwise, you first notice that 2.31 wafers enter the line. Of course, these are actually released in 25-wafer 300mm FOUPs (Front-Opening Unified Pod), but 100K wafers per month translates to 2.31 per minute. Since these factories run continuously, once the line is full, it stays full. And with an average total cycle time of 4 months, this means that there are 400K wafers of WIP (work in process) in he factory at any given time. This number, and the total number of equipment (5000+), drive the rest of the calculations.GEM (Generic Equipment Model) – SEMI E30, etc.The GEM messaging standards were initially defined in the early 90s to support the factory scheduling and dispatching applications that decide what lots should go to what equipment, the automated material handling systems that deliver and pick-up material to/from the equipment accordingly, the recipe management systems that ensure each process step is executed properly, and the MES (Manufacturing Execution System) transactions that maintain the fidelity of the factory system’s “digital twin.”Every minute of every day, GEM messages support and chronicle the following activities: 240 process steps are completed (i.e., 240 25-wafer lots are processed), 300 recipes are downloaded along with a set of run-specific adjustable control parameters, and 600 FOUPs are moved from one place to another (equipment, stockers, under-track storage, etc.). For each of these activities, the factory’s MES is notified instantaneously.GEM300 – SEMI E40, E87, E90, E94, E157With the advent of 300mm manufacturing in the mid-to-late 90s, a global team of volunteer system engineers from the leading chip makers defined the GEM300 standards to support fully automated manufacturing operations. Starting at 5:00 o’clock on the infographic, the number of transactions per minute jumps almost 3 orders of magnitude, from the monitoring of 900 control jobs across 4000 process tools to the tracking of 360,000 individual recipe step change events. This level of event granularity is essential for the latest generation of FDC (Fault Detection and Classification) applications, because precise data framing is a key prerequisite for minimizing the false alarm rate while still preventing serious process excursions. In this context, more than 6000 recipe-, product- and chamber-specific fault models may be evaluated every minute.Simultaneously, the applications that monitor instantaneous throughput to prevent “productivity excursions” and identify systemic “wait time waste” situations depend on detailed intra-tool wafer movement events. In a fab with hundreds of multi-chamber, single-wafer processes, 75,000 or more of these events occur every minute. EDA (Equipment Data Acquisition) – SEMI E120, E125, E132, E134, E164, etc.Rounding out the SEMI standards in our example gigafab is the suite of EDA standards which complement the command and control functions of GEM/GEM300 with flexible, high-performance, model-based data collection. The EDA standards enable the on-demand collection of the volume and variety of “big data” required from the equipment to support the advanced analysis, machine learning, and other AI (Artificial Intelligence) applications that are becoming increasingly prevalent in leading semiconductor manufacturers. As EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) lithography moves from pilot production to high-volume manufacturing at the 7nm process node and beyond, the litho process area will become a major source of process data by itself, generating 10 GB of data every minute. This is in addition to the 100 GB of data collected from other process areas. The End ResultThe final wedge (12:00 o’clock) in our infographic highlights the real objective – which is producing the millions of integrated circuits that fuel our global economy and provide the technologies that are an integral part of our modern way of life. Assuming a nominal die size of 50 square mm (typical of an 8 GB DRAM), the 2.31 wafers we started at 1:00 o’clock result in almost 3200 individual chips. But none of this would be possible without the pervasive factory automation technology we now take for granted. So, as you finish reading this posting on whatever device you happen to be using, take a micro-moment to acknowledge and thank the hundreds of standards volunteers whose insights and efforts made this a reality!You may not be responsible for running a gigafab anytime soon, but the SEMI standards used in this setting are no less applicable to any Smart Manufacturing environment. Give us a call if you’d like to know more about how these technologies can benefit your operations for many years to come.Alan Weber is Vice President, New Product Innovations, at Cimetrix Incorporated. Previously he served on the Board of Directors for eight years before joining the company as a full-time employee in 2011. Alan has been a part of the semiconductor and manufacturing automation industries for over 40 years. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from Rice University. For more information on SEMI Standards, please click here.

Korea is on track to top all other regions in fab investment, spending $63 billion between 2017 and 2020, with powerhouses Samsung Electronics Co. and SK Hynix leading the way, according to latest World Fab Forecast Report by SEMI. Samsung Electronics increased fab investments $770 million to $12 billion this year, and SK Hynix upped its spending a significant $2.8 billion to $7.25 billion in 2018.Korea's investment companies anticipate continued growth for both companies in the second half of 2018.Under this halo of extraordinary investment, nearly 380 SEMI Korea members and industry analysts gathered for 2018 SEMI Korea Members Day on September 13 to share insights on semiconductor market trends and new technologies that could help members bolster their competitiveness. Following are key takeaways from the event. Korea semiconductor market to grow 16% in 2018That’s according to IDC Korea VP Kim Soo-kyung, who noted that data center, memory and Internet of Things (IoT) are becoming key growth drivers for the semiconductor industry. He encouraged semiconductor companies to closely track development of automotive technology and the industry semiconductor market, both key growth areas. SEMI Korea president H.D. Cho opens SEMI Korea Members Day 2018 Continuing fab investment will lead to oversupply, but display will shineMarket entry by Chinese companies will also spur the oversupply, said Jeong Won-Seok, an analyst at HI Investment Corp. He noted that the oversupply will force Korea into stiffer competition with other regions. However, with OLED used for a wide variety of devices and the display industry seeing rapid growth, the sector will remain ripe for growth among Korean companies.Interconnecting various applications is a big semiconductor industry trendThe need for these interconnections will stand out in the mobility and high-performance computing (HPC) markets, said Park Sung-Soon, principal research fellow at Amkor Technology Korea, who addressed trends in packaging technology. He also emphasized interconnection cost efficiency as key to maximizing competitiveness.Smart Manufacturing is driving mass customizationAs semiconductor industry growth continues, production methods are shifting from ‘mass production’ to ‘mass customization,’ increasing the importance of Smart Manufacturing in driving greater production efficiency, noted BISTel VP Jeon Kyeong-Sik. Building a Smart Manufacturing platform to support large-scale production of specialized database and artificial intelligence (AI) chips will boost production efficiency, reduce costs and improve risk management. Virtual simulation will be a key enabling technology. SEMI analyst Clark Tseng presenting at SEMI Korea Members Day 2018 Surge in data volume and technology advances to drive long-term semiconductor industry growthThese key industry drivers will continue to power fab investment growth, with spending focused on 3D NAND, DRAM, and foundry, said Clark Tseng, director of Industry Research and Statistics at SEMI. China alone will see eye-watering growth with the region’s investments in domestic companies surging 46% from 2018 to 2019 and fab investment by Chinese domestic companies outpacing spending by foreign companies in China, Tseng predicted. SEMI membership rises with industry growthCulminating the event, SEMI Korea president H.D. Cho said, "With the growth of the semiconductor market, the number of SEMI members is gradually increasing, and we will help member companies grow with various activities such as Korea Members Day.”Jaegwan Shim is a marketing specialist at SEMI Korea.

Advances in areas from materials, packaging and testing to devices, equipment and standards must come together to enable smart factories and new capabilities in the microelectronics manufacturing supply chain. The secure transfer of information between factories is an important part of creating the “digital thread” that will give rise to higher yield, faster cycle times and reduced cost. At SEMICON West 2018, Tom Salmon, Vice President of Collaborative Technology Initiatives at SEMI, discusses his group’s work across the supply chain – including semiconductor front-end, packaging and test, as well as PCB and final product assembly – to accelerate the development of smart manufacturing. Ariana Raftopoulos is a marketing manager at SEMI.