Developing a web-enabled equipment driver for semiconductor equipment communications

Equipment communications is essential for semiconductor manufacturing automation. Equipment managers generally function to communicate between the manufacturing execution system (MES) and equipment. To achieve generality and reusability, our previous work developed a generic equipment manager (GEMG). The rules governing the GEMG were divided into three independent portions: system/framework rules, business rules, and equipment rules. These rules were implemented in the MES interface, controller application (CA), and equipment driver (ED) modules, separately. Among them, equipment rules in the ED modules are equipment-dependent. Connecting a different machine to the GEMG requires modifying the associated ED accordingly, which is a difficult task. To solve this problem, this study proposes a web-enabled equipment driver (WED) that uses mobile object technology. Initially, a mobile object model with a Java applet, namely WED, is developed. WED is constructed on the equipment (server) side. Then, the equipment manager (client) downloads WED via a web browser. This process does not need to modify the ED. Subsequently, the equipment manager can communicate with the equipment by either the Java socket technology using the HSMS standard or the object web technology through the CORBA or DCOM protocols using the OBEM standard. This proposed scheme has been successfully implemented. Illustrative examples reveal that the proposed mobile object model and WED establish a novel, efficient, and versatile scheme for semiconductor equipment communications.