Industry News, Trends and Technology, and Standards Updates

by Dave Faulkner

Executive Vice President, Sales and Marketing

Cimetrix Japan K.K. was officially incorporated on November 25, 2010.  The purpose of this new company is to demonstrate commitment to the Japanese OEM market, have a dedicated staff to grow Cimetrix business in cooperation with our distribution partners, and to provide even stronger customer support.  The company's directors will be Bob Reback, Dave Faulkner, Jodi Juretich and Kerry Iwamoto. 

The company will be managed by Mr. Kerry Iwamoto as General Manager and Representative Director.   Mr. Iwamoto started his association with Cimetrix as a customer when he worked for Innotech designing semiconductor process equipment.  Recently, he has worked for Cimetrix distributors CIM, ONC and Rorze.  Mr. Iwamoto brings a strong background in the semiconductor industry and Cimetrix products along with close relationships with existing Cimetrix customers in Japan.

Watch for more news as we launch Cimetrix Japan.

By Dave Faulkner

Executive VP, Sales and Marketing, Cimetrix

We had a strong showing at SEMICON Japan at the Makuhari Messe December 1 - 3.  Attendance was brisk, and Cimetrix products were on display at both the Meiden and the Rorze booths.  This event was a great opportunity for us, since we have just started Cimetrix Japan K.K. effective November 25, 2010.  The new Cimetrix company will provide both new market development and customer support for the Japan marketplace.

In the Meiden booth, Cimetrix EDA/Interface A products were on display.  In addition, Meiden highlighted the partnership between Meiden, DSD, and Cimetrix, which allows DSD and Meiden to offer complete EDA solutions using Cimetrix technology.  These solutions are available to both equipment suppliers and IC manufacturers, and Meiden listed the benefits and sample architectures for each group. 

 Cimetrix CIMControlFramework (CCF) was on display at the Rorze booth running a complete 450mm vacuum platform.  Many visitors stopped to watch this powerful demonstration.  Cimetrix products were also highlighted, along with Rorze’s unique ability to deliver a complete hardware/software platform solution for equipment suppliers using Rorze and Cimetrix technology. 

 One other highlight of the show was visiting the Axcelis booth where they highlighted their Integra plasma dry strip cleaning system that uses the Cimetrix CIMControlFramework. 

We also learned at the show that a new top 20 OEM in Japan would adopt Cimetrix connectivity products.  It is great to see how companies are using our solutions to get to their products up and running in wafer fabs around the world.

Thanks to all those people who stopped by the booths.  Please let us know if you need more information about Cimetrix connectivity or tool control solutions.

by David Francis
Product Manager

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to work with some large semiconductor companies, including, Intel, Motorola, Lucent, and Siltronic.  I developed interface acceptance tests for equipment they purchased.  At that time, the SEMI SECS/GEM standards were still new and not widely adopted.  Many of the tool vendors had little or no previous experience writing SECS/GEM interfaces, and they were often uncertain about the details of the standards, along with worrying about how they could comply with them.  Chief among the vendors’ concerns was how they could meet their design schedules without loading down their engineering teams with this new requirement placed upon them. 

Over the intervening years I worked in the scheduling and dispatching area of automated semiconductor manufacturing, and in that time I lost track of the SECS/GEM standards and their adoption by the wafer fabs.

Recently I joined Cimetrix as Product Manager for the connectivity and tool automation products, and now I am back in the world of SECS/GEM standards.  A lot has changed since those early years, as fabs moved from 200mm to 300mm, and now considering 450mm wafer fabrication.  In addition, the geometries have shrunk from 1 micron down to 40nm and below.  However, I still see many of the same industry concerns as I did many years ago, even though there has been little change to the SECS/GEM standards.

The real change I see is the wide spread adoption of the SECS/GEM standard.  Previously, only a few leading edge companies requested SECS/GEM interfaces on their tools and were working feverishly to set up host-side equipment controls.  Today, SECS/GEM is well rooted in 300mm semiconductor manufacturing and tool vendors have very mature automation interfaces.

The move to 300mm processing created an ideal opportunity for the development and adoption of the GEM300 standards. Building new 300mm tools created an ideal environment for designing in the GEM300 standards right from the start.

More recently, new standards, like Interface A, have emerged from their R&D phase and are now going through the same refining process that SECS/GEM went through a decade ago.  These new standards will continue to support the industry’s efforts to create more efficient devices, at ever-decreasing geometries, with increased reliability and yield quality.

It is exciting to be working with these standards again and looking at them from the other end of the wire – the tool-side as opposed to my previous fab-side experience.  I look forward to writing more about how the tool vendors are adopting, and demonstrating compliance, to the new standards.

We've returned home from the show... tired, but excited about some of the great discussions and opportunities from the show! Although it was evident that SEMICON West is changing, it was also clear that the industry is rebounding and many new projects are getting underway.

Here a couple of quick snap shots of our booth:

We will be following up with visitors and customers this week. If you saw us at the show, thanks for stopping by and we look forward to continuing the conversation!

The semiconductor industry's largest event of the year, SEMICON West, is right around the corner.  And with the market in recovery, we expect it to be a good turn out and a great show.

This year, Cimetrix has several exciting new developments to discuss at the show:

• GEM Implementation - Faster & Better
  We've been at work developing a new solution that enables an even faster GEM implementation... while still improving the already high level of quality you've come to expect from Cimetrix. Designed to cover 90% of typical GEM interfaces, the new solution helps reduce time to market (and headaches) for our customers.
• The Year for Interface A - Are you Ready?
  ISMI announced the new Freeze Version of the Interface A Standards on June 17. Also, with increased SEMI investment and fabs requiring implementation, this has quickly become a hot topic. Is your software able to support multiple versions of the Interface A standard at the same time? Are you set up to adopt the new version effectively and efficiently?

We would love the opportunity to discuss your unique needs and projects with you further at the show.

Not registered for the show?  Email us for a free pass.

We will be in the South Hall - Booth #2331.

See you at the show!

by Brent Forsgren,
Director of OEM Solutions

Fabs are like people, each one has it own personality traits. Fortunately, and arguably unfortunately, unlike people, most fabs have a handbook for their “personalities” in the form of specifications. I have found it interesting, that like people, fab “personalities” have common and unique features. Here are a few of examples:

• There are some fabs that I would classify as the “Clean Freak.” Compliance to GEM and GEM 300 standards is important but more important to them is preventing cross contamination between FOUPs, and from wafer to wafer – “Who left this loadport door open? Don’t you know you can spread particles by doing that??”
• Then there are other fabs that I would classify as the “Punctilious.” Again, compliance to the GEM and GEM300 standards is required but more important to them is knowing exactly when you are going to be done, when you are ready for more, are you done yet, how much longer are you going to be, are you done yet?
• Then there are other fabs that are “Methodical-ious” (if I can make that a word). Everything must happen in a very specific order. 1) Don’t allow jobs to exist without material at the tool first; 2) Download the recipe before every job that is created; 3) Create the job now. 4) If the FOUP is removed before the job starts, refer to rule 1.
• And let’s admit it, all fabs are “Control Freaks,” if they weren’t we wouldn’t be in business. They control when jobs are run, how jobs are run, and what a job does.

Hmmmm……that makes me wonder, if fabs are like people, does that make companies like Cimetrix psychiatrists?

by Doug Rust,
Director, Product Engineering & Customer Support

The time shift for daylight savings this week is going to cause me some grief for some time. Most countries in Europe will not adjust until March 28. Many countries in Asia (India, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia and Japan for example) are not adjusting for daylight savings at all in 2010. Since our customers are all over the world, I’m going to have a tough time keeping in sync. It’s inevitable that I’ll miss some important event this month. So, I thought it would be very àpropos to submit a blog about Time Synchronization.

SEMI® standard E148 defines software standards for the equipment communication interface to enable the equipment control computers to automatically synchronize their clocks from a standard time base. Although this standard was just published a couple years ago, it is not new technology. Computer systems have been using internet technology to synchronize their clocks with a common time base for over 20 years now. The Network Time Protocol (NTP – a.k.a RFC1305) is the internet standard for time synchronization that is designed to enable any computer to synchronize with a reference clock (most commonly the atomic clock in Colorado) through various time servers available on the internet. SEMI E148 specifies the NTP standard as the mechanism for synchronizing the equipment control computer with the factory computer systems (as well as some other requirements).

This is becoming a critical capability as factories begin to adopt other information technology that enables them to collect thousands of precise data points from each run on each tool. Making effective use of this data requires that the time-base for data source ‘A’ is the same as the time base for other data sources so that the raw data can be assimilated and correlated to produce valuable manufacturing information. If there was some important “event” in manufacturing that we need to analyze the first thing we will do is to try to determine what else was happening at the time of that event. So the first question we ask is “when did that occur?” That’s where we can run into serious problems if there is no common time base.

Most modern operating systems have the NTP client software built-in. It’s possible to synchronize with reliable time servers on the internet and there are many affordable commercial time servers available. Even if users do not implement all of the E148 requirements, I suspect we are going to see more and more factory networks using NTP to synchronize the manufacturing equipment with factory hosts over the next year (if they haven’t already done it). For me, I guess I’m going to be out of sync at least until May 28.

by DeAnn Rowan,
Marketing

As a blog reader, we would like to ask you a question:

So….What do you think?

We’ve been at this blogging thing for 6 months (almost to the day) now. We’ve seen a lot of interest as the traffic to our blog posts continues to rise at a rapid pace. The entire Cimetrix team has provided contributions and feels passionate about the information that we have been sharing with readers.

Some of our most popular posts to date – and ones you’ll want to check out if you haven’t already - include a narrative touting the benefits of software frameworks, a comparison of the data collection functions of SECS/GEM and Interface A, and the answer to the “He Said/ She Said” game between equipment and host.

What have you found to be the most valuable?
What topics would you like to see discussed more? Or less?

We want to be a resource of information for you regarding the SEMI connectivity standards and their implementation. As you read through our blog, please feel free to ask questions or provide insight on the topics being discussed. We welcome your comments!

In addition to this blog, we encourage you to interact with us, and others within the manufacturing community, via various social media networks:

Use these avenues as an alternative means to ask questions, provide feedback, and stay abreast of any industry or Cimetrix updates.

Thank you for your continued readership and we look forward to future discussions.

Connect with Us on LinkedIn:

• Bob Reback, president and CEO
• Jodi Juretich, CFO
• Dave Faulkner, EVP Sales & Marketing
• Bill Grey, Director of Research & Development
• Brent Forsgren, Director OEM Solutions
• Doug Rust, Director Product Engineering & Customer Support
• Brian Rubow, Manager Customer Support
• Stu Benger, Director of Sales North America
• Bruce Febvret, Director of Sales Europe

by Bill Grey,
Director of Research and Development

2009 was a tough year and it is good to see the Semiconductor industry coming back. With development projects ramping up, here is a peek at the new technologies coming out this year:

AMD has some new 45 nm Phenom II and Athalon II CPUs out and has the 6-core 45 nm Thuban CPU coming out later in Q2. 2011 will follow with a Llano 32 nm quad-core APU and 32 nm Bulldozer core CPU called Zambezi with up to 8 cores.

Intel has 32 nm rolling strong with the release of the Clarkdale CPU with 2 cores this quarter. They will follow up with the Gulftown processor around mid-year with 6 cores.

It doesn’t look like processing power will be much of a problem any more. =)

For developers, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 in April. 

Among the changes that got me excited are:

• better support for parallel code development and debugging
• debugging of mixed-mode native and managed code on 64-bit operating systems
• the Visual F# programming language
• reference highlighting in the editor (finally!)
• call hierarchy navigation for C# and C++
• box selection for copy/paste (finally!)
• .NET background garbage collection instead of concurrent garbage collection for better performance
• .NET tuple objects for structured data
• .NET memory-mapped files (shared memory)
• .NET String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace method indicates whether a string is null, empty, or consists only of white-space
• Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) to build extensible and composable applications

Office 2010 comes out the first half of this year with some new collaboration features such as co-authoring and PowerPoint presentation broadcasting.

On the Windows side, Windows 7 is here in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors and is being adopted much faster than Vista was when it released. Windows Server 2008 R2 is out for the server platform. For embedded systems, Windows Embedded Standard 2009 has replaced Windows XP Embedded and a new version is on the way called Windows Embedded Standard 7 (Windows 7 based).

How many semiconductor manufacturing tools will need or will go to a 64 bit operating system this year?

One item that could spur the move to Windows 7 is a change in hard drive technology that is not targeted to be supported by Windows XP. Hard drives are moving from 512 byte sectors to 4 kilobyte sectors and will be incompatible with Windows XP. Some of the smarter drives may have a compatibility mode for Windows XP, but at a cost of reduced performance. This will start in early 2011.

Would you be interested in learning more about these emerging technologies and their effect on Cimetrix products? If there is a significant interest, Cimetrix plans to host a webinar on this topic in the near future.

This week, SEMICON Japan 2009 will be invading the Makuhari Messe in Chiba, Japan. The largest international exhibition of semiconductor equipment and materials, vistors can expect over 1500 exhibiting companies as well as co-organized events including the SEMI Technology Symposium (STS). SEMICON Japan takes place Wednesday, December 2 - Friday, December 4.Exhibits will be open from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm.

We hope to see you there!