An approach to recipe control in wafer fab

Due to the capital intensive nature of semiconductor manufacturing, companies are consistently looking for ways to maximize the utilization of the manufacturing tools and avoid errors that may result in loss of capacity. Incorrect specification of the process parameters while processing products is a major source of scrap and yield loss, thus resulting in lost capacity. A recipe management system, which can be used to consistently manage all types of recipe, will go a long way to address this issue. This paper presents the data flow and functional design to support a recipe controller. This methodology of recipe management can be used for all three recipe formats-binary, formatted and ASCII. The methodology is based on the use of a mapping file. This paper presents the challenges/issues while dealing with different recipe formats, along with examples, and further develops an approach for a recipe controller.