Equipment engineering systems

Abstract

The need of the semiconductor industry for fully automated production to reduce the production time and costs makes it necessary to control all equipment remotely. To make improvements possible it is necessary to have exact data of the current state of the production for each single equipment. Because the machines are connected already to the infrastructure the collection of data can be done also fully automated by using the equipment's information. Such a system is the TFM (Total Fab Monitoring) developed by AIS Automation GmbH. But with automating the daily work the risk is also increased if one of the systems in the architecture fails. Since the risk will ever be present the fabs need a solution to react on problems very fast. This was the reason for AIS to develop an e-diagnostic system VRC (VAC Remote Control). It is used productively in a modern fab in Dresden for supervising the equipment integration software and hardware which is the basis for the automation of the production. The paper describes these two important applications of the MES level.