semiconductor manufacturing equipment

As the world confronts the health crisis of a generation in the form of the fast-spreading coronavirus, the microelectronics industry remains firmly in the spotlight. Aware of the central role they play in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, a growing number of companies are joining efforts to combat the virus by developing technologies for coronavirus detection, contact tracing and predicting its spread.SkyWater Technology, a U.S.-based foundry and prestigious member of SEMI-Fab Owners Alliance, is on the front lines in supplying an essential microfluidic MEMS component used in COVID-19 testing and research to identify mutations of the virus. This component is instrumental for the sequencing kit in the DNBSEQ-T7 system, an ultra-high-throughput sequencing system manufactured by MGI, a subsidiary of global genomics leader BGI Group.SEMI had the pleasure to catch up with Thomas Sonderman, president of SkyWater Technology, to talk about the company’s valuable contribution to the detection of COVID-19. He also gave us a peek into its business continuity plan and the safety measures it is taking to resiliently run a 24/7 chip-making operation amid these unprecedented times.SEMI: Tell us about SkyWater's contribution to the detection of COVID-19 and your partnership with MGI?Sonderman: SkyWater has been working with genomics sequencing leader MGI for several years to supply a critical component used in MGI's DNBSEQ-T7, an ultra-high-throughput sequencing system. The component we supply to MGI is a microfluidic MEMS device that uses microscopic channels to help perform very small-scale chemical reactions in the genetic sequencing platform. MGI's DNBSEQ-T7 identifies and monitors possible mutations of viruses, which is important for epidemiologists when tracking how viral illnesses such as COVID-19 spread through human populations.MGI’s sequencing system is used in parallel with its sister company BGI Genomics’ RT-PCR test kit, which is typically used more broadly as an initial screening agent due to its ability to return virus detection results within a matter of hours. Sequencing with the DNBSEQ-T7 can be used to confirm results of the RT-PCR tests that have indicated positive for the presence of the virus and then to perform a full DNA sequence of these positive specimens, which can help track mutations in the virus.DNBSEQ-T7 is important in the fight against COVID-19 as it tracks how the virus changes and enables scientists to look at its genetic sequence like a fingerprint at a crime scene. Their focus is on finding sudden changes in the sequence over time — a mutation. When they analyze available genomes from infected patients in several countries, they can see if inevitable virus mutations are causing associated illnesses that may have different incubation periods, contagiousness or deadliness – all critical dynamics that must be tracked by public health officials during an outbreak such as this.SEMI: What was the path that brought your company to the forefront of this testing?Sonderman: MGI’s DNBSEQ-T7 sequencing system and BGI’s RT-PCR rapid testing kit were among the first officially approved products by the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA – essentially China’s version of the FDA) – to fight the outbreak. MGI’s manufacturing plant, based in Wuhan, was able to fast-track its response, producing and delivering test kits very quickly to many hospitals and disease control centers in Wuhan and other cities in China.As concerns continue to rise about COVID-19 and we strive to flatten the curve, the pressure is on to enable even faster, more accessible testing. On March 27th, BGI’s RT-PCR virus detection test received FDA Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for use in the U.S. The test works in just three hours. MGI’s DNBSEQ™ T7 sequencers are being used in China and other countries now and will be available in the U.S. starting in Q3. Products from BGI/MGI and affiliates are currently being distributed to more than 70 countries and regions worldwide to assist the global efforts in fighting the pandemic.SkyWater is certified to the ISO 13485 Quality Standard for Medical Devices to support the design, development and fabrication of DNA sequencing and other biochip applications in a wide range of emerging biomedical market segments. This allows us to provide this type of cutting-edge technology solution that is making an important contribution to coronavirus detection.SEMI: Given the challenges COVID-19 has placed on workforce and supply chain, what steps are being taken by your company to mitigate disruptions? Sonderman: SkyWater has been identified as Essential Critical Infrastructure per the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security in several categories including Healthcare/Public Health Sector, Defense Industrial Base Sector, Information Technology Sector, and Critical Manufacturing Sector. To maintain continuity of operations, we contacted our close market partners as we need their support to continue supply of their starting and manufacturing support materials necessary for us to maintain operations. We asked these organizations to make every reasonable effort to fulfill our order requirements while also following recommended protective measures and are actively monitoring these relationships for possible developments that could be disruptive. By means of their partnership with us, these suppliers, too, are a part of the Essential Critical Infrastructure. Currently, there has been no change in wafer operations or fab utilization during this time of COVID-19.In addition to our sustained operations, our fab expansion is well underway as construction continues. The over 60,000-square-foot facility expansion adds clean room area and infrastructure to support the Department of Defense’s investment in SkyWater to broaden our production capabilities for Strategic Rad-Hard electronics and other complementary technologies. A fab technician in SkyWater’s SkyTech Center, an expansion of its operations to enhance advanced processing capabilities at its U.S.-based and U.S.-owned manufacturing facility. SEMI: What advice would you give to other companies seeking to keep their operations running amid COVID-19?Sonderman: First and foremost, creating a Pandemic Response Team (PRT) was critical for us in planning how to operate and communicate during this crisis. Our PRT updates our leadership team multiple times per week to enact procedures and ensure alignment throughout the organization. We follow CDC alerts and other local, state, and federal government guidelines on how to deal with home and work environments while communicating with all company stakeholders. This is important in providing reassurance of the company’s continued business and details on any potential change in operations.Increasing the frequency of communication with the organization’s supply chain to anticipate any disruptions in service is vital. Also, keeping in contact with customers is imperative to take the pulse of their continued operations during COVID-19. We recommend being flexible and pursuing new paradigms in getting business accomplished, such as telecommuting. In addition, if a company is deemed an essential business, we suggest drafting a letter in advance for employees should they need to prove why they are in transit (to and from work) if transportation becomes severely limited and monitored.Communicating with employees on how operations are changing is crucial. Ensure there is an intranet site that employees can access remotely via laptops or mobile devices that allows for ongoing updates and a way to communicate to all employees as things continue to evolve.We also put several safety measures in place, including: A screening process was set up to take the temperature of everyone entering the building. Site access is restricted for vendors, contractors, customers and other visitors as a default policy. Employee travel is restricted. All employees who can do their jobs from home can stay home. For essential on-site workers, we allow flexible schedules so people can move shifts if needed. Shifts have been staggered so people are not congested at lockers, gowning areas and other places. Physical distancing is required everywhere inside and outside the building. Video conferencing is being used even for participants inside the building. The number of people allowed in conference rooms is limited to comply with physical distancing; some chairs were removed and maximum occupancy signs were posted. Hand-sanitizing stations have been set up. We are providing employees access to masks, gloves and cleaning wipes. Safety measures are posted around the building and cleaning frequency of hard surfaces has been ramped significantly. These safety measures are among several other modifications we’ve made to daily operating procedures. SEMI: Please share some examples of how the SEMI Fab Owners Alliance (FOA) has helped support your business?Sonderman: Our Pandemic Response Team has leveraged the FOA recently by participating in its webinars on COVID-19 to ensure we are using industry best practices. We also use FOA surveys to provide and request information pertaining to COVID-19 practices.We have implemented building entrance protocols (i.e. temperature scanning, restricting access for non-employees) and expanded building cleaning procedures, including increasing the cleaning frequency of specific high-touch items. We have adjusted shift start times to minimize the number of personnel in the change room at the same time and we store each fab worker’s hood in the sleeve of the suit. These last two items resulted from a conversation with another FOA member.Outside of the pandemic, we have leveraged the FOA by participating in its industry-wide maintenance best practices and learning group that meets monthly on maintenance needs, issues and concerns within the industry. This allows us to learn from each other within the semiconductor industry. We have also leveraged this group in sourcing parts and/or parts sharing on tools no longer supported by OEMs.We greatly value the type of cross-organizational sharing and learning the FOA facilitates. It has been beneficial in a number of ways over the years. At this time, the FOA is especially useful when best practices are crucial to enable us and our peers to minimize disruptions, operate with the utmost safety, and quickly adapt to this new environment.SkyWater is a member of the SEMI Fab Owners Alliance, an international group of semiconductor and MEMS fab managers and industry suppliers that meets regularly to solve common non-competitive manufacturing issues and improve their business results. Nishita Rao is a product marketing manager at SEMI.

For the past several months, U.S. Department of Commerce officials have been developing proposals to amend the foreign direct product rule to require a license for the use of U.S.-origin semiconductor manufacturing equipment or technology in producing semiconductor devices for Huawei and its affiliates. Commerce has also advanced proposals to amend the de minimis rule to expand license requirements for shipments to Huawei and its affiliates of semiconductors produced outside the U.S. and incorporating minimal amounts of non-sensitive U.S. content.The expansion of both rules is among the many Huawei-related actions the administration is pursuing that include a government procurement ban, replacing Huawei equipment in rural U.S. networks, and prohibiting imports of technology and services from unspecified foreign adversary nations. The de minimis proposal was under final interagency review, and the direct product rule next in line for further action, when on February 18 President Trump issued a tweet saying that “The United States cannot, will not, become such a difficult place to deal with in terms of foreign countries buying our product, including for the always used National Security excuse, that our companies will be forced to leave in order to remain competitive.”Speaking to reporters later that day, the president, referring to chipmakers and Huawei, said “I think people were getting carried away with it… Things are put on my desk that have nothing to do with national security.”This week, SEMI President and CEO Ajit Manocha sent President Trump a thank-you letter for his comments and warned that the proposals could severely impact the U.S. and global semiconductor and electronics industries, create confusion and uncertainty in manufacturing supply chains, reduce investment in new capacity, and lead to the design-out of U.S. technology and U.S. components. SEMI also stressed that unilateral controls on U.S.-origin semiconductor devices, equipment, materials and technology could significantly and disproportionately harm U.S. companies, serve as a disincentive for further investments and innovation in the U.S., and impact non-U.S. companies as well. SEMI continues to work with policymakers to build awareness of the damaging and far-reaching effects of these proposals. The 2020 sales forecast for the global semiconductor manufacturing equipment market, excluding the U.S. (since the proposals only directly affect non-U.S. fabs), is approximately $53 billion. With U.S. producers accounting for roughly 40 percent market share, over $21 billion in U.S. equipment sales to non-U.S. fabs could be affected. Non-U.S. companies whose equipment incorporates U.S.-origin components and technology could also be impacted, and every fab worldwide using U.S.-origin manufacturing equipment or technology to produce items destined for Huawei would need to stop their use immediately and file for a license and/or remove U.S.-origin equipment and technology from production lines used for Huawei and its affiliates. The president’s remarks, along with the resignation of two key officials supporting the proposals, have created uncertainty around the next steps. SEMI is holding regular conference calls to keep members up to date and developing strong messages for members to use in their communications with government officials. SEMI Advocacy in Washington remains actively engaged with executive and congressional officials to ensure that U.S. export controls are narrowly tailored to specific national security concerns and applied at the multilateral level with major trading partners.Joe Pasetti is Vice President of Global Public Policy and Advocacy at SEMI.

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.