Automated Preventive Maintenance Of Plasma Etch Systems With The Secs Protocol

Wafer Fabrication equipment requires scheduled preventive maintenance (PM) to insure the optimum system performance and uptime in production environments. System down time can severely impact the utilization and profitability of a semiconductor manufacturing plant. Preventive maintenance is performed manually on a routine basis ranging from daily PMs to annual PMs by equipment engineers and technicians. The manual acquisition of PM data can vary drastically from one technician to anot.her causing unneeded system down time and inaccurate data tracking. Investigated here is a new software package called LamPM that automates the daily PMs on plasma etch systems through the Semiconductor Equipment Communication Standard (SECS-II) protocol. Leak rates and Mass Flow Controller (MFC) data is automatically collected and stored with tolerance limits applied to the data. The user is then informed of failures. Automating the daily PM reduces technician hours while providing accurate: and consistent data. Jntroduction