Background

Over the past several years, the semiconductor industry has realized a number of requirements to achieve greater efficiency for manufacturing future technology. The most visible of these is to reduce the cost per cm2 of silicon produced. This has translated into an industry-wide effort enabling the production of 300mm wafers.

The key features of size and weight of 300mm material has led to a number of issues that had to be resolved. Material handling is the center of attention, as it is required to reduce or eliminate operator interaction due to ergonomics and the cost per wafer. This issue by itself cascades into a tremendous collection of other issues to be considered related to automation including a number of software issues.

Motivated by the need for ergonomic and fully automated material handling solutions, a firm set of standards for the 300mm factory has been adopted and is illustrated below:

300mm Solutions
SDI, in cooperation with our partner company CIMETRIX, provides semiconductor equipment suppliers with a fully turnkey software solution implementing the SECS/GEM standards (E-4, E-5, E-30, E-37, E37.1) and the new 300mm SECS scenarios (E-39, E-87, E-90, E-94, E-40).

SDI is able to implement the 300mm scenarios on top of existing GWGEM (tm), sdiStation (tm), and CIMConnect (tm) platforms.

SDI uses fully off-the-shelf proven software components for the entire implementation. The software in Windows NT native and ActiveX/COM based. Each 300mm Scenario (e.g. E-87) comes in the form of an off-the-shelf COM object that can be implemented stand-alone or in conjunction with other 300mm Scenarios. Already today, five 300mm semiconductor equipment models use the SDI solution.

SDI uses the proven CIMConnect product (formerly known as sdiStation Equipment Developer) and the new CIM300 product to implement the SECS/GEM and 300mm Scenarios.

The end result is a fully working SECS/GEM and 300mm ready platform for prompt delivery from the equipment suppliers to the customers. In addition, each 300mm module comes with a 36 months maintenance agreement that will automatically provide the customer with updates and keep up with changes and modifications to the 300mm standards.

Benefits

• Use of off-the-shelf modules lessens risk and long term maintenance cost
  
• Faster delivery times and lesser cost than an in-house "homegrown" implementation by full time staff
  
• Lower cost of ownership thanks to a three year maintenance agreement guaranteeing automatic updates as the standards evolve.
  
• Seamless integration to existing SECS/GEM packages regardless of vendor
  
• Well established customer support environment to assist in fab deployements 
  

300mm SECS Interface Scenarios