INFICON

The latest MEMS and sensors advancements in markets ranging from displays to biotech and in key areas of manufacturing including sensor devices and fabrication came into sharp focus at the 2022 MEMS & Sensors Technical Congress (MSTC) in late April as 120+ industry experts gathered in Berkeley, CA.

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 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.