Development of a generic equipment manager for semiconductor manufacturing

The purpose of this research is to develop the generic equipment manager (GEMG) which can either operate alone or be integrated with the manufacturing execution system (MES). In order to achieve generality and reusability, the governing rules of the GEMG are divided into three independent portions: system/framework rules, business rules, and equipment rules. The system/framework rules specify the requirements to become a pluggable component of MES framework. The business rules are company-dependent and are equipment-independent. A controller application module, which drives desired scenarios, is developed to realize the business rules. The equipment rules are equipment-dependent and are company-independent. These equipment rules are achieved by the module of equipment driver which compiles appropriate behaviors. Considering reusability, the so-called generic equipment interface (GEI) messages which are fine-grained, company-independent and equipment-independent are developed to be the communication messages between the controller application and equipment driver, therefore reusability is easily accomplished. Several examples are shown to demonstrate the generality and reusability of the GEMG.