Advanced industries – like the semiconductor – often face challenges in managing production in complex equipment scenarios, where machinery and systems are highly specialized, interconnected, and subject to frequent reconfigurations.
A key struggle for traditional MES platforms in such environments is adapting to dynamic production requirements without compromising operational efficiency. Complex equipment scenarios often involve frequent changes in production schedules and resource allocations. MES must not only manage these transitions smoothly but also ensure that the equipment operates within its constraints and maintains optimal performance.
These challenges highlight the need for MES to evolve with enhanced adaptability, scalability, and integration capabilities to meet the demands of modern manufacturing environments.
The Semiconductor multi-chamber equipment problem
In some essential semiconductor frontend operations like Deposition and Etch, machines typically have several chambers, or process modules, that can be set up to perform different processes. For example, in a metal deposition machine, there can be a chamber setup to deposit copper, another for aluminum, another for titanium, etc. A wafer will typically only go through one or two chambers in each process step, before heading to the following Lithography or Etch processes.
This diversity of chamber roles brings higher flexibility for operations, allowing the same machine to be used in different stages of process and enabling a higher product mix. The machines can take wafers of different lots, at different stages of the process flow, being processed at the same time across different chambers.
The choice of elements setup in each chamber needs to be made considering the production process demands for each element, in order to balance WIP and avoid bottlenecks on particular chambers.
In a way, each chamber is its own independent tool, subject to its own production planning, dispatching and maintenance schedules.
On the other hand, the chambers are still just a part of a bigger machine, that connects and controls all load ports, transport modules and process modules. The chambers can only be used through the top-level machine, which handles the interface with operators and external systems, orchestrates the machine’s job queue, and the respective execution of the recipe sequences.
Single-armed cluster tool with four chambers.
One of the challenges of multi-chamber scenarios for MES, is managing WIP according with the availability of the main machine, together with the availability of the required inner process chamber modules. For example, if a copper deposition chamber is down, Materials requiring a copper layer need to be redirected to alternative machines. However, the main Equipment is still up and able to process materials that might require only Titanium or Aluminum deposition chamber services.
This additional level of dispatching rules based on the Equipment’s sub-component states, is often lacking or underdeveloped in traditional MES platforms, requiring human intervention and manual adjustments to WIP, crippling the MES abilities to efficiently schedule operations.
How can the MES do better?
Most generalist MES focus on addressing the 80% most common use cases. More often than not, this is not good enough – the unfulfilled 20% of use cases can hinder production efficiency and decrease the value-for-money of the MES.
It is important that the MES also covers most of the industry-specific scenarios, and that it is flexible enough to be extended to easily cover the site-specific scenarios, without the need for costly customization.
Some of the features of the latest Critical Manufacturing MES version 11.1 include specific management, dispatching and tracking, for both Multi-Chamber machine clusters and Batch Equipment scenarios. This adds to the existing Critical Manufacturing coverage for handling a wide range of independent and line-based production equipment scenarios. In the next post, I’ll cover batching orders for ovens, furnaces and sterilization chambers, and other complex equipment scenarios.
Advanced Fab Capabilities for Agility and Success
The complete guide to advanced scenarios in semiconductor manufacturing
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