Semiconductor production is mainly divided into three major processes: design, manufacturing, and packaging and testing. A large number of production equipment are required in the two processes of manufacturing and packaging and testing, including etching, deposition, cleaning, electroplating, packaging, testing, and so on. At present, my country’s semiconductor industry is developing rapidly, production equipment has also achieved a large number of localization, and technology implementation methods are also developing rapidly.
In semiconductor manufacturing, the management of the production process is completed collaboratively by MES, EAP, etc. The production management system issues instructions to the equipment in real time, and controls the process flow according to work orders and recipes. At the same time, it is also necessary to obtain various equipment parameters, indicators, status and other data from the equipment in real time, obtain various alarm information generated by the equipment, and statistical data during the production process, so as to finally perform statistical analysis on these uploaded data. Form a batch report to guide production.
There are many types of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and there are many equipment suppliers. Many of them are different from semiconductor manufacturers. Therefore, certain standards must be followed between these equipment and manufacturers. For example, in the process of production control and management, a set of semiconductor industry specifications must be followed, which includes the communication standard between semiconductor production equipment and control systems, that is, the SECS/GEM protocol.
It specifies a unified specification for communication between the two, including the configuration of connection parameters for both parties, supported communication functions, format of communication messages, data and status of key production steps, production alarm information, output and statistical data, and control signals A series of content such as sending and receiving.
In this context, equipment manufacturers are required to have corresponding solutions to enable products to support SECS/GEM protocol communication. The choice faced by domestic semiconductor equipment manufacturers is usually to choose a hardware PLC that supports SECS/GEM, or to set up a research and development team to try to implement the SECS/GEM protocol through software. The former is costly and the brand is limited, and the latter has labor costs for development and maintenance High and long development cycle, there is a risk of development failure, and the stability of the function is yet to be tested.
Post time: Mar-29-2023