fabLIVE - Real Time Visualization

fabLIVE - real time shop floor visualization and monitoring

The complete overview of a production line is of paramount importance for high tech industries. fabLIVE is a real-time virtual window to the production line with interactive performance monitoring.

"Advanced Semiconductor Electronics (ASE), the world's largest provider of independent semiconductor manufacturing services in assembly and test, selected and implemented fabLIVE for its facilities in Shanghai."

The benefits of MES are well proven in increasing productivity and yield. Yet, many manufacturers are reluctant to implement a complete MES for various reasons including financial and human resource constraints.

fabLIVE provides a high value add tool for manufacturers who:

Only need monitoring capability or a subset of MES functionality
Want a gateway or phased approach to implementing full MES
Have a legacy MES that lacks graphic visualizations and Line-at-a-Glance capability;

Major Benefits:

Reduce Equipment Downtime
Increase Factory Throughput
Improve OEE (Overall Equipment Efficiency)

Achieved through a highly configurable and extensible solution that comes with a significant set of ready to use industry standard elements:

Industry standard OEE models, including SEMI E10, SEMI E30, SEMI E58 (beyond the fully configurable state model via a fabLIVE integrated GUI)
Ready to use OEE improvement reports like site / area / equipment OEE View or Alarm Analysis Report

To even increase the value of the solution, fabLIVE is MES Master Data Integration ready:

Allows integration with MES Master Data to provide integrated views for Report Analysis
Allows real-time display of equipment WIP information (material or container being processed)

fabLIVE allows data to be manually entered or published from an existing MES system, but perhaps the greatest advantages are achieved with automatic equipment data collection. The solution set provides ready to use:

Equipment automation connection possibilities, including SECSI/HSMS, GPIB, TTL, etc.
Collection of equipment alarms (e.g. S5Fx)
Integration with Alarm caused OCAPS (via optional cmNavigo Exceptions Management module)

fabLIVE enables a quick overview of:

Detailed information about individual tools
Groups of equipment
Division by areas
Combine online data with efficiency reports
One fabLIVE for each production floor or
Complete production line visualization.

Different visualization for different people

Visualization needs for different roles such as management, maintenance, or operators vary. fabLIVE is user customizable to show specific areas of interest, be it a full shop floor layout or a customized screen for a specific tool. Performance can be monitored on a standard desktop or on a video wall.

To use fabLIVE to access the details of the different production areas, simply:

Import a layout, and start drawing the areas and different tools
Associate the drawings to individual objects
Save - and that's it! fabLIVE is immediately ready to be used.
All the updates are delivered using a publish/subscribe mechanism - no need to press refresh button

fabLIVE works in standalone mode, integrated with an existing MES or in combination with cmNavigo - Critical Manufacturing's MES and Production Control System.

fabLIVE details

fabLIVE Designer

Equipment is characterized in terms of x, y, z coordinates, width and height on the imported picture
The states to be monitored are associated to different colors (ex. green=productive, red=down, yellow=waiting)
Equipment is then further grouped in to equipment groups
Reports, charts or material list widgets are then associated to a tool, area or facility
Factory layout can be based on an existing layout file - upload the layout and sketch over the equipment and areas.

fabLIVE Runtime Viewer

Visualize the real-time state of a factory, facility, area, group of equipment or single tool in a blueprint with status and other information (e.g. time on state)
Drill-down from a higher level representation of facilities or areas to individual equipment levels, – zooming with cmNavigo graphical animation capabilities
Detail level monitoring can show one piece of equipment, with its available elements. Additional functions, within the context of the equipment such as equipment historical information and materials being processed, can be viewer.

Proven state-of-the-art technologies

Productivity is a function of time which means the sooner a problem is detected, the sooner it can be resolved and operational impact minimized. fabLIVE provides a real-time portal into the shop floor to deliver critical information where ever you are. Through the use of Microsoft’s Silverlight technology , visualizations on clients, which include desktops, laptops or mobile devices, are updated in real-time – no need for special client side software or time delayed polling strategies to get updates.There are no software client installations or time delayed polling strategies to get updates.

The systems allows the display all available data in a standard set of out-of-the box widgets including:

History Widget – provides the history of a particular object
Object Details Widget – displays the properties and attributes of a particular object
Query Widget – displays a query of any object
Report Widget – displays any report
Resource List Widget – displays a list of resources in a graphical format.
Chart Widget – displays basic Material and Resource information in a graphical form

In addition, the widget mechanism can be extended to create custom widgets

In terms of infrastruture, the solution is based on a scalable hardware infrastructure. Including fault-tolerance and network load balacing mechanisms, the system is prepared for very high volume critical systems, having been field proven in a high volume facility connected to more than one thousand equipment.