Industry News, Trends and Technology, and Standards Updates

Note: this will be the last blog published on cimetrix.com. For all future blogs, please visit our blog on PDF Solutions website.

Background

The SEMI North America, the Information & Control Committee meets three times per year, but this year the schedule is changed due to the SEMICON West  biennial  relocation to Phoenix beginning this year. SEMI held summer meetings in North America on June 2-4 at SEMI headquarters in Milpitas, CA. Like usual, the meetings are hybrid where attendees can join in person or remotely. The first two days are task force meetings including the GEM 300, ABFI (Advanced Backend Factory Integration), GUI, CDS (Fab & Equipment Computer & Device Security ) and DDA (Diagnostics Data Acquisition) task forces with Cimetrix task force leaders. The third day is the committee meeting where final decisions are made (usually) based on task force recommendations. This is a summary of what happened in some of the task forces and the committee meeting.

Note that all ballots that pass in the committee are still subject to a final review by the global SEMI Audit & Review committee, where a ballot technically can still fail when proper SEMI procedures and regulations are not strictly followed. This is rare in the North America Information & Control Committee but can happen and has happened.

A SNARF is a Standards New Activity Report Form. Before a task force can submit a ballot proposing a new standard or to modify an existing standard, the SNARF for this work must be approved by the technical committee.

Note that SEMI publishes a website with all global committee information where anyone can peruse the extensive details. It is at this website: https://www.semi.org/en/products-services/standards/developing-technical-standards.

Leadership Changes

Several leadership changes were approved during these meetings. For the last several years, Brian Rubow has been vice-chair of SEMI North America (NA) RSC Organization. During the NARSC meeting, Brian was nominated as co-chair. Alan Weber was nominated as co-leader of the Equipment Data Publication task force and co-leader of the Fab & Equipment Computer & Device Security Task Forces.

GEM 300 Task Force
Several weeks prior to meeting, Brian submitted a SNARF to the GEM 300 task force members for review. The SNARF proposes developing a new standard that enables secure GEM interface communication using gRPC technology and TLS. The new standard would be an alternative to the existing SECS-I and HSMS protocols used today. Neither of today’s protocols are secure and therefore present a cybersecurity risk. Feedback on the proposed SNARF indicates clear approval that we need a secure GEM protocol. However, the means to achieve security is still up for debate. Alternatives to gRPC offered by task force members include HTTP/2, WebSockets and secure TCP/IP communication. We discussed this a little at the task force meeting and plan to start meeting regularly to discuss and debate the alternatives until a technical solution is selected. We also decided to postpone approving any SNARF for this work until we decided on a technical direction. The addition of a secure protocol will be the big improvement to the GEM standard. Anyone interested in this topic should join the North America GEM 300 task force. The task force approved to work on ballots to modify the well-known implementations in four standards, E30 (GEM), E40 (Process Job Management), E87 (Carrier Management) and E90 (Substrate Tracking). In GEM, we wish to clarify the well-known naming for the Processing State Model collection events. Since every equipment can implement a unique Processing State Model tailored to its operation, the number and name of the Processing State Model collection events vary. We expect each of these ballots to be relatively small. The task force is also working on another ballot (7345) for the E90 (Substrate Tracking) standard related to batch processing. The current E90 standard is unclear how to report when batches are assembled and disassembled. The batch location state model has contradictions between the batch location states OCCUPIED and UNOCCUPIED and the transition tables. The ballot proposes a solution to the contradiction and additional collection events for batch assembly and disassembly. This ballot is ready for review by task force members and will be submitted for voting in the next voting cycle.

DDA (Diagnostics Data Acquisition) Task Force

The DDA task force remains very active while trying to finalize the EDA (Equipment Data Acquisition/Interface A) freeze 3 standards. All activities are focused on this goal. Ballot 7321A proposes changes to the core EDA standards, E120/E120.2, E125/E125.2, E132/E132.2, E134/E134.2 and E179. This ballot intends to be the final ballot for Freeze 3 for these core standards. It introduces one new feature, filtering E125 metadata to allow clients to request a subset of the equipment metadata when calling GetParameters, GetExceptions, and GetSimpleEvents. The other proposed changes reflect issues raised by task force members. These issues were raised either during the last vendor test session or since then as software development teams implement EDA Freeze 3 software. Both line items in the ballot failed and will be reworked for voting in Cycle 7 and adjudicated at SEMICON West in October. By failing the ballot, we can resolve the issues reported in ballot 7321B and resolve a few more issues reported since ballot 7321A was submitted. The final piece to EDA Freeze 3 is an update to the E164 standard (Specification for EDA Common Metadata). This ballot also failed and will be reworked for the next voting cycle. When these ballots (7321 and 7180) are approved and published by SEMI, we expect EDA Freeze 3 to be complete. Then we will modify standard E178 (Guide for EDA Freeze Version) to officially declare the EDA Freeze 3 version. In addition to this work, the DDA Task Force is also working on subordinate standards to E164. Each subordinate standard will standardize EDA metadata for one GEM-based standard, standardizing how to implement that standard in an EDA interface. The subordinate standard for E40 (process job management) is nearly ready for task force review. This work is outside the scope of EDA Freeze 3, only applicable when you implement the respective standard, but still directly related to EDA Freeze 3. This constitutes the bulk of remaining work.

ABFI (Advanced Backend Factory Integration) Task Force

The ABFI task for approved a SNARF to work on E142 to resolve some editorial changes and to add well-knowns to the subordinate standard E142.4. The task force is also working on a ballot to update the recently published E192 Guide for Equipment Adoption Criteria for GEM and GEM-Related Standards. Since this guide was published, two new standards related to GEM were published including the new Cybersecurity standard E191 and a new equipment data publication standard E190. This ballot has been submitted to the task force for review and will be submitted to SEMI in the next voting cycle.

CDS (Fab & Equipment Computer & Device Security) Task Force

SEMI standard E191 Specification for Computing Device Cybersecurity Status Reporting was published less than a year ago. The current version requires a GEM interface to publish two status variables to identify operating system information about the equipment’s factory facing computers. One identifies the computers, the other identifies the operating system manufacturer, name, version and build information. This helps factories identify cybersecurity risks within the factory and request upgrades. Ballot 7311A proposed to enhance the E191 standard by publishing additional information, introducing two additional status variables. One identifies the list of installed updates. The other identifies installed operating system components. This ballot passed and now awaits review by the Audit & Review committee before publication.

Next Steps

The North America Information & Control Committee will use SEMI voting Cycle 7 for the next round of ballots. Ballots are due to SEMI by Thursday, July 24 2025. These ballots will be adjudicated at SEMICON West October 6-8 at the Phoenix Convention Center.

Background

The SEMI North America, the Information & Control Committee meets three times per year, but this year the schedule is changed due to the SEMICON West semiannual relocation to Phoenix beginning this year. SEMI held winter meetings in North America on February 24-26 at SEMI headquarters in Milpitas, CA. Like usual, meetings are hybrid where attendees can join in person or remotely. The meetings include task forces with leaders from Cimetrix on the GEM 300, ABFI (Advanced Backend Factory Integration), GUI, and DDA task forces as well as the committee meeting on Wednesday. This is a summary of what happened in the task forces including GEM 300, ABFI and DDA and other task force activities. There were few ballots this last cycle, but I will also include updates from the Fall meetings in 2024 since I did not create a blog for those meetings.

Note that all ballots that pass in the committee are still subject to a final review by the global SEMI Audit & Review committee, where a ballot technically can still fail when proper SEMI procedures and regulations are not strictly followed. This is rare in the North America Information & Control Committee but can happen.

I also wish to note that SEMI publishes a website with all global committee information where anyone can peruse the extensive details. It is at this website: https://www.semi.org/en/products-services/standards/developing-technical-standards.

GEM300 Task Force

The most recent changes to the GEM and GEM 300 standards include the addition of ‘well-known’ names for all required collection events, alarms, data variables, status variables and equipment constants within each standard. Recent ballots are related to fixing a few errors in these new tables and updates based on other ballots. This work is finally done for the core standards. Next step in this long process is to update the EDA (Interface A) E164 standard and new subordinate standard to require use of these well-knowns and also to update the SEMI E172 SEDD standard to require use of the well-known names in equipment SEDD files. This has taken a couple years to develop, but ultimately will be extremely useful to quickly map host software applications to implementations, both for EDA and GEM interfaces, and to identify GEM data in EDA implementations. Quicker mapping means quicker equipment integration at the factory.

Last fall, the GEM 300 task force passed some minor updates to the E90 substrate tracking standard in ballot 7278. This includes adding a couple new variables related to the substrate attributes not previously called out specifically yet were added more for completeness than usefulness. This winter, another E90 ballot 7316 passed that corrected a long existing spelling inconsistency for variables between E90 and E90.1. This should not affect implementations, yet some implementers may wish to rename a couple of variables in their implementations to match the standard.

Last fall, the GEM 300 task force made similar changes to the E87 carrier management standard in ballot 7279. In addition to adding a few new well-knowns mapping to additional port and carrier attributes, the well-known names for alarms now support port specific alarms. Well-known names were added for the Carrier Complete Prediction state model, recently updated in 2024 with significant changes. Finally, the carrier’s substrate count attribute format was modified from a limiting 1-byte to allowing 4-byte implementations. This is an important improvement for the semiconductor backend industry where there can be hundreds of substrates on a carrier, unlike semiconductor front end where the substrates are typically wafers and limited to 25.

This winter an E157 Module Process Tracking ballot finally passed in its third attempt. This ballot significantly enhanced to support equipment that don’t have a process chamber. The current published standard focuses on reporting recipe execution in a process module, where all the material in the chamber is processed simultaneously. Most importantly, the standard enables reporting when each step in the recipe begins and completes. Many equipment in especially outside of semiconductor front-end don’t have a process module and instead have continuous flow operation. The enhancements to E157 enable reporting the recipe execution on a specific substrate, including when each step begins and completes. This is another example how GEM related standards are adopting to the needs of backend equipment.

Ballot 7312 replaced ballots 7275 and 7276 from the 2024 fall meetings to implement well-known names in SEMI E5, the SECS-II standard. The task force decided to rename E30 well-known names that originate in SEMI E5 with an ‘E5’ prefix instead of ‘E30’. This passed ballot completes the current plans to develop these well-known names in the GEM related standards.

DDA Task Force

Last fall, the DDA task force pass just one ballot. Ballot 7288 resolved a few issues raised by task force members and an update the .proto files to align with the current Protocol Buffers Style Guide. By conforming to the Protocol Buffers Style Guide, gRPC code generators can better adapt to language specific styles.

After the DDA task force met last fall, a group of companies volunteered to test the data collection features using the proposed gRPC interface definitions and updated E134 standard. Previous test sessions had already validated E132 Session Management and E125 Equipment Modeling. A test plan was created and previously distributed to the participants. Attendees alternated connecting with each other’s software as clients and servers and then collecting data. Five companies participated. Twenty-eight issues were submitted of varying severity. Based on this feedback, the DDA task force created ballot 7321 to correct known issues. Since then a few more issues have been reported. The task force ballot failed one of the ballot line items and will resubmit with corrections and a few additional changes for voting in the upcoming cycle. If all goes well, the changes in ballot 7321A will become the core of the EDA Freeze 3 standard. We can hope!

The DDA Task Force is also actively developing a ballot to update SEMI standard E164 which establishes EDA equipment modeling guidelines. New subordinate standards will map GEM 300 standards to a specific EDA freeze 3 implementation based on the well-known items recently defined in the GEM 300 standards and based on the updated primary standard E164 guidelines. This is the final piece to establishing a complete EDA Freeze 3 standard. Client and equipment server implementers can develop software before E164 is finalized.

ABFI (Advanced Backend Factory Integration) Task Force

No ballots were adjudicated in the ABFI task force. Instead, the task force continued several open discussions. We discussed how a ballot from last year was published as a new standard SEMI E192 Guide for Equipment Adoption Criteria for GEM and GEM-Related Standards. The guide was just published in January 2025 and aims to provide a high-level overview and organization of the 40+ GEM related standards and the GEM related 30+ subordinate standards. The guide is meant to introduce the many GEM related standards for newcomers and experts alike. Since the guide was written and now published, several developments have occurred which require the guide to be updated.

• The Computer and Device Security task force in the Information & Control Committee developed a new GEM-related standard, E191.
• The GEM 300 task force expanded the scope for E157 including a title change.
• The Equipment Data Publication task force in the Information & Control Committee developed a new GEM-related standard, E190.

A new ballot was approved to update the SEMI E192 guide with these latest changes.

Additionally, the ABFI task force is planning to update the SEMI E142 substrate map specification to include standardized XY coordinate system mapping.

CDS (Computer & Device Security) Task Force

The CDS task force is actively updated SEMI standard E191, the Specification for Computing Device Cybersecurity Status Reporting. This new standard defines standard status variables on a GEM interface regarding the operating system for each computer in the equipment, such as the name, version and build of the operating system. This enables factories to track the operating systems on the computers and compare this with any known vulnerabilities and request equipment computer patches and upgraded. The standard will be updated to provide more information, although the additional data is not yet completely decided.

Information & Control Committee

A new order of business was introduced in the Information & Control Committee by representatives from the Physical Interfaces and Carriers committee. Our two committees share control of the SEMI standard E84 the Specification for Enhanced Carrier Handoff Parallel I/O interface. Some users are interested in developing a new TCP/IP based protocol be introduced to replace the parallel I/O interface. The discussions are preliminary just seeking interested parties at this time.

To learn more about the SEMI standards, the committees or just to speak with an expert please click the button below. 

This blog explains an approach that Cimetrix CIMControlFramework^TM (CCF) developers can use to customize CCF for load ports without any carrier ID readers.

When implementing a loadport, you may implement a derived loadport by inheriting the LoadPort class that includes the Carrier ID reader from CCF.

If the Carrier ID reader is unavailable, you will then need to try modifying the derived loadport in several situations.

Among them:

• When the loadport does not physically have any Carrier ID Readers.
• When a Carrier ID Reader is temporarily unavailable.

However, CCF provides a cool configuration parameter to address these challenges without changing the source code.

The rest of this posting briefly shows you how to accomplish this, and how to disable Carrier ID Reader.

How to disable the Carrier ID reader

When the Supervisor is not running, open the configuration file ‘Runtime\Configuration\Config.cfge’ by double-clicking on the file. Please make sure that Supervisor is not running before you move forward to the following because the Dynamic property of the configuration parameter is false.

If the configuration file is not opened automatically with CCF Configuration Editor, run ‘CCF\Bin\Cimetrix.ConfigurationEditor.exe’ and select the configuration file by clicking ‘File - Open’ on the top menu.

Go to the ‘LP1IDReaderAvailable” parameter in ‘FactoryAutomation – LoadPorts’ on the left tree panel. This parameter is for LoadPort 1. So, if you would change the parameter for LoadPort 2, go to ‘LP2IDReaderAvailable’.

Go to the ‘Value’ item in the right property panel and change the value from True to False. Then save the configuration file. Additionally, please apply the same value to the decrypted file ‘ConfigDecrypted.cfgx’.

This change will disable the Carrier ID Reader in the Load Port without changing any source code. Therefore, your derived Load Port can operate without a Carrier ID reader.

How to test it

Then run Supervisor and Operator Interface.

After that, you can enter a Carrier ID yourself manually on the Operator Interface when loading a carrier.

 

In Summary

• You can disable a Carrier ID reader by changing the configuration parameter ‘LPxIDReaderAvailable’ for Load Port x without changing any source code.
• You can enter a Carrier ID value yourself on the OperatorInterface.

All are helpful solutions for CCF developers who need to implement Load Port without Carrier ID Reader.

To learn more about this solution and other CCF programming best practices, please schedule a time to talk with a Cimetrix representative.

 

Today I would like to give an update on SEMI Standards activities in Korea. 

Though it began in 2024, our group does not have an official name yet; for the time being, we simply call it the “Autonomous Fab Working Group.”

As you can infer from the name, the goal is to establish a SEMI standard for the Autonomous Fab. Though this may represent a challenge for some of the major semiconductor manufacturers, given their presence in the global market, it is natural that these companies, like Samsung and SK hynix would need to have a vital role in this initiative.

A little history is appropriate at this point. This activity first began with a forum meeting during SEMICON Korea 2024 last February. Samsung’s executive vice president held a keynote session as a part of the SEMICON Korea conference, and it ignited the participants’ imaginations to suggest ideas for a new SEMI standard. After SEMICON, SEMI Korea organized a follow-on meetings to further develop these ideas. Several meetings were held, and we agreed on the main themes and specific focus areas for a number of sub-groups.

I joined as a representative of PDF Solutions, Cimetrix Prdoucts. Samsung and SK hynix sent 5-7 engineers each. Other Korean equipment suppliers and software companies, such as Miracom, Wonik, Global Zeus, Doople, and BISTel, joined as well.

The following summary of a recent meeting provides additional insight into this effort:

• Working title: Autonomous Fab Working Group
• Purpose: Develop Autonomous Fab standard to achieve better competence and innovation, maximize the efficiency and quality of semiconductor manufacturing processes
• Related activities
  • Standardization and authentication of Autonomous Fab technology
  • Sharing information for cooperation
  • Establishing active relationships between industry and academia
  • Prediction and response of future technologies
  • Developing an educational program to train new industry people

We plan to have another meeting in July to elect a co-chair for the main working group and fill the other leadership positions.

As many know, Samsung and SK hynix are big influencers for this activity. Sharing technology and ideas can be difficult because of sensitivities. However, with SEMI’s guidance, we believe we can achieve a useful level of consensus for a new standard in the near future.

The six steps for the first approach are:

1. Share common points and goals
2. Choose main themes
3. Derive subitems from #2
4. Set priorities
5. Perform steps for standardization
6. Complete subitems

With this guidance, our first decision was to set up two internal subgroups and assign each their area of work.
Briefly, one is for hardware and one for software. The two groups and subjects are,

1. PM Automation sub-group: Factory footprint & area, Transfer robots, safety, etc.
2. Data & Traceability sub-group: Automated data handling, version management, security, etc.

In addition to the above, all the members agreed that if we have more hardware companies join, such as robot, EFEM etc., it will be an abundant discussion, therefore, SEMI will invite these companies to join at the next meeting.

It has been great to see all of these companies come together and work toward the same goal.

Our next meeting will be on July 17^th (KST). We hope to see everyone there!

Earlier this quarter (16-18 April 2024) Alan Weber and Jon Holt were privileged to deliver the 3-hour tutorial that always precedes the opening session of the annual European Advanced Process Control and Manufacturing (APC|M) Conference. This year’s conference was held in Hamburg, Germany and again co-located with the Smart Systems Integration (SSI) Conference and attracted more than 200 participants across the industry and around the globe.

In a slight break with tradition, rather than diving deeply into one or two APC-specific technologies, Alan and Jon took a broader perspective, covering a wide range of topics that are germane to production implementations of APC and related advanced manufacturing applications. The rationale for this approach is that APC can no longer be considered a standalone suite of applications, but an integral part of an increasingly complex factory information and control system. As a result, APC practitioners should have at least a working knowledge of these necessary complementary technologies.

Against this backdrop, the theme of the tutorial was “Smart Manufacturing System Engineering for Semiconductor Factories;” the target audience included APC and smart manufacturing application developers, system engineers, and managers; and the only prerequisites were a keen interest in improving semiconductor manufacturing capability and control and a desire to understand the broader context of APC.

The session covered a broad range of topics at limited depth to give participants an understanding of how APC and other smart manufacturing applications work together in a production environment. It identified shared requirements such as data sources, standards, implementation technologies, and other system architectural elements that offer a unified perspective on this overall domain. Finally, it listed sources of information for those wanting to explore these topics in more depth.

We were fortunate to have about 120 participants in the tutorial and received positive feedback about the choice of topics and quality of the material. Alan and Jon “tag teamed” the topics shown on the agenda slide below and could have continued for another couple of hours given the attendees’ level of interest. 

A number of participants were especially appreciative of the industry history section, which emphasized how relatively young the semiconductor manufacturing industry is, and how rapidly it has evolved through global collaboration on the development of device and manufacturing technologies, enabling industry standards, and business models.

Other areas of high interest included (with presentation excerpts):

• Manufacturing applications that often co-exist with mainstream APC applications…

• Use of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) in a real production setting

• Other implementation technologies that support manufacturing at the gigafab scale

• Key enabling industry standards for all the above, especially data collection and traceability

Even though there is no substitute for being present at an interactive tutorial like this one, If you would like access to some or all of this material, please contact us at by clicking the button below, and we’ll be happy to share and discuss it with you. Who knows… perhaps as a result we’ll see you at next year’s Europe APCM conference.

Next year’s conference will be 10-12 April 2025 in Prague (Czech Republic), so mark your calendars and plan to spend a few informative days in one of Europe’s most iconic cities! And for you music lovers… come early and/or stay after – you won’t regret it.

Background

The SEMI North America Information & Control Committee meets three times per year; spring, summer and fall. This year the spring meetings were held on March 25, 26, and 27 at SEMI headquarters in Milpitas, CA. The meetings include task forces with leaders from Cimetrix on the GEM 300, ABFI (Advanced Backend Factory Integration), GUI, DDA, CDS task forces as well as the committee meeting, held on Wednesday. This is a summary of what happened in the task forces I am highly involved in, including GEM 300, ABFI and DDA. There were few ballots this last cycle, especially compared to the last meetings.  

Note that all ballots that pass in the committee are still subject to a final review by the global SEMI Audit & Review committee, where a ballot can still fail when proper SEMI procedures and regulations are not strictly followed. This is rare in the North America Information & Control Committee but can happen. 

GEM 300 Task Force

Ballot 6836A was modified to address issues raised by several voting members at the fall meetings. In this round of voting, the ballot passed with no rejecting votes and some minor comments from me. Ballot 6836A modifies both specifications E87 Carrier Management and E90 Substrate Tracking. In Substrate Tracking, the substrate object now defines a new optional attribute, “AdditionalInfo”. This attribute is used to designate a list of name/value pair information to be used as needed. The existence of the attribute is standardized, but the usage and values for the names in the name/value pair are custom to be used as needed. For example, an equipment handling multiple substrate types can use a name/value pair to distinguish between the different substrate types. In Carrier Management, carrier objects now define a related new optional attribute “AdditionalSubstrateInfoMap” to store the list of name/value pair information for all substrates in a carrier. These new features enable GEM 300 like E90 and E87 standards to be more easily adapted to all types of equipment and applications.

The Japan GEM 300 task force has proposed ballot 7173 to make minor improvements to the text in the GEM E30 standard. The proposed changes have been submitted to other regions including North America for review. None of the changes are technically significant and should not affect existing GEM implementations.

A few new ideas for ballots were also discussed at the task force. Following are some details on two items that were discussed.

The most prominent new discussion proposes changes to the E157 Specification for Module Process Tracking. Currently, adoption for this standard is limited to equipment that have one or more well-defined or virtual process modules. There are many types of equipment outside of Semiconductor Front-End that do not have a clear concept of a process module like equipment with conveyors moving substrates through the equipment. The new ballot would propose modifications to E157 to define a new, similar state model that can be adapted to report processing details for a substrate rather than a process module. This continues a trend at SEMI to make changes to allow for easier GEM adoption in other industries and more types of equipment.

Another ballot proposes some changes to the new ‘well-known’ subordinate standards to the GEM and GEM 300 standards that establishes standardized names for the alarms, data variables, collection events, status variables and equipment constants required by these standards. While these new subordinate standards have not yet been published, a couple changes are under consideration soon once they are published.

DDA (Diagnostics Data Acquisition) Task Force

• Ballot 7174 was approved to update E128 Specification for SML Message Structures with language to include Transport Layer Security (TLS) because Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) has been deprecated by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). E128 is a key standard in Equipment Data Acquisition communication freeze 1 and 2.
• Ballot 7175 was proposed to update E132 Specification for Equipment Client Authentication and Authorization and the E132 gRPC implementation with several issues found while preparing for EDA Vender Test #2.
  • Line item #1 introduced the most significant change; a modification to the password hash algorithm to be a binary array instead of a string. A binary array is more appropriate due to the software hash functions available to programmers. This line item failed due to a technical error in the ballot. The line item will be reworked to resolve this technical mistake and other errors that were revealed later in the week during EDA Vender Test #2.
  • Line item #2 moves some requirements from E134 to E132 in cooperation with ballot 7176. This ballot adds the requirements to E132 and passed.  
• Ballot 7176 was approved to move requirements from E134 Specification for Data Collection Management to E132 in cooperation with ballot 7175 line item #2. This ballot removes the requirements from E134. 
• Ballot 7191 approved changes to E179 Specification for Protocol Buffers Common Components. The ballot primarily introduces some optimizations to the protocol buffer usage to avoid sending parameter type information twice. This affects both ParameterValueType and ArrayParameterValue in the protocol buffer implementation. The changes also clarify the handling of 1, 2 and 4-byte integers by separating into unique types in E179. 
• A software vender test #2 was held on the day following the North America Information & Control Spring meetings. Anyone implementing client and/or server software was invited to attend. Instead of testing for standard compliance, the purpose of the vender test was to test interoperability and flush out any remaining issues in the EDA freeze 3 standards. This software vender test session #2 focused on previously untested E132 features from software vender test session #1 and will also include E125 tests. Several companies including Cimetrix attended the vender test session, providing both client and server functionality for testing against each other. Although official results of the test have not yet been made public, the primary issue discovered is that the password hash algorithm needs to be clarified. 
• A software vender test session #3 will be held either immediately following the North America Information & Control Summer meetings held in conjunction with SEMICON West in July, or after the Fall meetings in November. This test session will focus on E134 testing. Mid-April the task force will decide when to proceed.
• Future ballots were proposed for E125, E134, and E179 without specific known issues. In addition to the open ballot for E132, the task force can handle making any last minute changes to the EDA standards before EDA freeze 3 is declared.

ABFI (Advanced Backend Factory Integration) Task Force

No ballots were adjudicated in the ABFI task force. Instead, the task force conducted several open discussions. 

• A ballot has been approved to proposed modifications to E90 Specification for Substrate Tracking to accommodate equipment that have multiple substrate ID readers. Currently E90 assumes that an equipment only has one type of substrate and therefore one substrate ID reader. As the GEM 300 standards are implemented on more backend equipment, issues like this are revealed and need a standardized resolution.
• A previous proposal, 6840, to create a Specification for Equipment Adoption Criteria for GEM and GEM-Based Standards was cancelled. In its place a new proposal was approved to create a Guide for Equipment Adoption Criteria for GEM and GEM-Based Standards. A guide differs from a specification because it does not include any requirements. The new guide will help anyone implementing GEM technology understand how the vast number of GEM related standards fit together and when they should be used.
• A new activity was introduced to consider handling substrates with topside and bottom-side identification. More to come as the task force investigates this further. 
  
  

SEMICON West 2024

The next North America Information and Control meetings will be held in conjunction with SEMICON West in San Francisco. The dates will be July 9-11, 2024. Due to the association with SEMICON West, these meeting typically have the most in person attendees.

In a SECS/GEM communication session, numerical values are important because they are used by the equipment to report results in the form of process variable values or inspection data to a factory host system, and by the factory host to update configuration data, recipe parameters, and other variables on the equipment.

This blog post describes how the item formats in SEMI E5 (SECS-II) map to the specific numerical values used in an equipment application. 

Item Format for numerical values in SEMI E5

The SEMI E5 (Specification for SEMI Equipment Communications Standard 2 Message Content (SECS-II)) standard document defines the following Item Format Codes for numerical values. Note that the table also includes the SEMI E173 (Specification for XML SECS-II Message Notation (SMN)) XML element type for each format code. 

 

An item format for a numerical value is usually chosen as the same value type used by the equipment application when it defines the variable internally.

There are the other Item Format Codes defined in SEMI E5; for further details, refer to the SEMI E5 standard document.

Big-Endian and Little-Endian

Computer memories primarily use a little-endian system in which the least significant byte of a numerical value is stored at the smallest memory address and the most significant byte at the largest.
In contrast, SEMI E5 uses a big-endian system in which the most significant byte of a numerical value is transmitted first and the least significant byte last.

For example, the decimal value 123,456,789 is represented by 0x075BCD15 in hexadecimal.

In a computer’s little-endian system, the least significant byte 0x15 is stored at a memory address X, and the most significant byte 0x07 is stored at X + 3.

In the SEMI E5 big-endian system, the most significant byte (0x07) is transmitted first, and the least significant byte (0x15) is transmitted last.

 

This endian conversion should be handled automatically by a SECS driver in compliance with SEMI E5—the equipment application does not need to take care of it.

Minimum and Maximum number of bytes for one item

In SEMI E5, the number of bytes for a single item is called the length bytes and its valid range is a minimum of zero (0) bytes up to a maximum of 16,777,215 bytes (0xFFFFFF in hexadecimal). A zero-length (0 bytes) item means that the item is empty (NULL). In general, a one-length (1 byte) item is used to represent a single item with a single value. Items with more than a 1 byte length usually contain array values with up to 16,777,215 elements for a 1 byte item in the array (total 16,777,215 bytes), 8,388,607 elements for a 2 byte item (total 16,777,214 bytes), 4,194,303 elements for a 4 byte item (total 16,777,212 bytes) and 2,097,151 elements for an 8 byte item (total 16,777,208 bytes).

Difference between Signed Integer and Unsigned Integer

Unsigned integer values are usually used for an identifier like an ID value. Specifically in the superior standard document, SEMI E30 (Specification for the Generic Model for Communications and Control of Manufacturing Equipment (GEM)), an identifier item should be defined as an unsigned integer format in SEMI E5. Examples include ALID, CEID, DATAID, ECID, PRTID, SVID, TRID, VID.

Difference between Binary format and 1-byte Unsigned Integer

There are two Item Format Codes—Binary format (Octal 10) and the 1 byte Unsigned Integer (Octal 51)—whose values can range from 0 - 255.
The Binary format with 1 byte length is specifically used for acknowledge codes. For example, 0 = Accepted, 1 = Error (not accepted), and so on.

Binary format with more than 1 byte is usually used to transmit a binary array such as binary file data.

How to choose between 4-byte Floating Point and 8-byte Floating Point

The precision of floating point numbers is different between float type and double type.

The precision of the float type is about 7 decimal digits, which corresponds to the single floating point, 4 byte Floating Point (Octal 44) in SEMI E5.

The precision of the double type is about 16 decimal digits, corresponding to the double floating-point, 8 byte Floating Point (Octal 40) in SEMI E5.

For further information, refer to IEEE 754 Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic.

Conclusion

This blog post has summarized how the item format is defined for numerical values in SEMI E5 (SECS-II). To learn more about SEMI standards, you can purchase and read the SEMI standard documents themselves, and feel free to contact the Cimetrix Support team by clicking the button below.

Background

The SEMI North America, the Information & Control Committee meets three times per year; spring summer and fall. This year the fall meetings were held on November 6, 7 and 8, 2023 at SEMI headquarters in Milpitas, CA. The meetings include task forces with leaders from Cimetrix on the GEM 300, ABFI (Advanced Backend Factory Integration), GUI, DDA, CDS task forces as well as the committee meeting on the final day which was held on Thursday instead of the typical Wednesday. This is a summary of what happened in the task forces I am highly involved in including GEM 300, ABFI and DDA. The recent voting cycle included 22 ballots—the most ballots in one voting cycle that we have seen for a very long time.  

Note that all ballots that pass in the committee are still subject to a final review by the global SEMI Audit & Review committee, where a ballot can still fail when proper SEMI procedures and regulations are not strictly followed. 

GEM 300 Task Force

A lot is going on the GEM 300 task force. The following SEMI standards were reapproved: E39 and E39.1. Reapprovals occur every 5 years else a standard becomes inactive.  

Ballot 7066A proposed changes to the SEMI E87 Carrier Management Services (CMS) standard. This ballot failed previous voting, but now time passed as a ‘superclean’ ballot (no negatives or comments during voting). This ballot included a significant change to the Carrier Ready to Unload Prediction feature which is now called a Carrier Complete Prediction. Anyone who implemented Carrier Ready to Unload Prediction will have to make a lot of changes to comply with the new implementation. A primary driver for this change is to accommodate internal buffer equipment where the READY TO UNLOAD state depends on when the host sends a CarrierOut message and the queue of previously requested activities; therefore, not a useful prediction to make. 

The benefit of this new state model is to notify the factory host before a carrier is completed so that the automatic delivery can be scheduled to arrive for pickup when the carrier is ready. This can shorten the time it takes for the factory to move material from one equipment to the next. 

Seven similar ballots 7114, 7115, 7116, 7117, 7118, 7119 and 7120 were submitted respectively for standards E5/E30, E40, E87, E90, E94, E116 and E157 to define a ‘well-known name’ for each require collection events, variables and alarms. The ‘well-known’ names are aliases for mapping purposes; necessary because each implementation can use different names. The ultimate goal of this feature is to make the GEM and standards based on GEM more plug-and-play. This new feature serves at least two purposes. Standard E172 already defines a well-known name attribute in the SECS Equipment Data Dictionary (SEDD) file. In the Equipment Data Acquisition (EDA) standard freeze 3 version, E164 will use this well-known name as well. The regular GEM documentation can also reference the well-known name. To explain the value of this feature, E90 requires a collection event for Substrate Location State Model transition 1. Implementers might define this collection event using any name such as E90_Loc_Unoccupied2Occupied, SLTrans1, SubstrateLocationUnoccupiedToOccupied or CollectionEvent901. Any name is allowed. The new well-known name establishes a standardized alias name called the well-known. 

When ballot 7117 is published, the well-known name table establishes well-known name “E90:SubstrateLocation:001:Unoccupied-Occupied” as the standardized alias for this collection event. This SEDD file can be downloaded through the GEM interface, tell the GEM host exactly which collection event implements the Substrate Location State Model transition 1. During the Information & Control Committee, ballot 7117 resulted in a Ratification ballot handling a long existing E90 naming issue for one status variable. All of the other ballots passed with a simple editorial change. 

A few of the above well-known name ballots included additional line items to resolve issues in the respective standard, mostly editorial or minor. Ballot 7114 included an E5 clarification that Stream 21 Function 17/18 sequence can be aborted by the receiving entity with an S21F0 message. Ballot 7116 included several additional changes/corrections to E87. 

1.    Clarification on the CARRIER SLOT MAP STATUS state SLOT MAP VERIFICATION FAILED, which sometimes was spelled in E87 without the ‘ED’ in FAILED. 
2.    Corrections to Table R1-21 in the table heading.

3.    Carrier object attribute Capacity can now be format code 51, 52 or 54, increasing the allowed carrier size from 255 to 4.29 GB to accommodate carriers not holding wafers but smaller substrates. 
4.    Carrer state model transition 7 includes a new trigger as already described scenario R1-21. 
5.    Scenario R1-20 was reverted to its original design, undoing an error introduced in 2012

6.    And finally, equipment constant BypassReadID was added to E87.1. This equipment constant has been defined in E87 but missing in E87.1

Ballot 9836 proposed some synchronized changes in E87 and E90 to define new name/value pair attributes. The ballot failed due to some limiting details in the value format definition. The ballot intends to allow equipment and factory to agree to using additional substrate content and characteristic information.

The Japan GEM 300 task force is working on improving the GEM E30 standard. The task force proposed a number of minor improvements mostly editorial to clean up several areas with the specification. Although the work was originally proposed to occur in the North America group, the task force decided to handle this ballot in Japan who will meet in December of 2023. Of course, the regional GEM 300 task forces worldwide all share and vote together on all E30 ballots.

DDA (Diagnostics Data Acquisition) Task Force

The DDA task force reapproved three standards: E128, E138 and 145. Additionally, the DDA task force made more plans to complete the Equipment Data Acquisition (EDA) freeze 3 version. Here are the key activities and findings as of today:

• E164 will be modified to incorporate the well-known names from the GEM 300 force. Instead of including all GEM 300 standards directly in the E164 primary standard, each GEM 300 standard will have a smaller, simpler E164 subordinate standards (E164.1, E164.2, …) to define the EDA implementation for that standard. This strategy makes adopting EDA and E164 more flexible to use in industries beyond semiconductor front end equipment.
• Some errors were found in the published .proto files for E132 and E134. New ballots will be submitted as soon as possible to make corrections.
• A software vendor test #2 will be held immediately following the North America Information & Control Spring meetings. Anyone implementing client and/or server software is invited to attend. Instead of testing for standard compliance, the purpose of the vender test is to test interoperability and flush out any remaining issues in the EDA freeze 3 standards. This software vender test session #2 will focus on previously untested E132 features from software vender test session #1 and will also include E125 tests. Anyone interested in joining should contact me (Brian Rubow) or Albert Fuchigami (Brian’s co-leader). Prior to the software vender test session, the task force co-leaders will provide a test plan document and .proto files with corrections in E132 for known issues.
• A software vender test session #3 will be held immediately following the North America Information & Control Summer meetings held in conjunction with SEMICON West. This test session will focus on E134 testing. 

ABFI (Advanced Backend Factory Integration) Task Force

Ratification ballots R2924A and R6925A both passed. This means that the new Consumables and Durables standard is in the SEMI publication queue. 

Additionally, ballot 6948 passed with several great improvements to the E142 substrate mapping standard. The improvements should help users better understand how to use the E142 schema files for more consistent adoption by implementers. 

Spring 2024

The next North America Information and Control spring meetings will be held again at SEMI headquarters in Milpitas, California. The dates will be March 25-27, 2024. Although many attendees were remote during these meetings, I expect many more attendees to be in person at these spring meetings due to the EDA software vender test session.  

To learn more about the SEMI Standards and the work we do as members of SEMI, please click the button below.

Do you need to develop complex drivers for the components in your equipment? Let’s see how the CIMControlFramework^TM Communicator Framework helps you accomplish this.

What is the CCF Communicator Framework?

The Communicator Framework simplifies the low-level message handling to and from the hardware by encapsulating the connection between CCF and the device.

As an example, consider how the connection is made between control software and hardware devices. An ASCII serial connection needs a socket connection using TCP, a multi-threaded mechanism to handle multiple messages to/from the devices, logic to synchronize the commands and their respective responses, and several other functions. This is a lot of work when developed from scratch.

As an alternative, CCF provides a built-in ASCII serial connection class to achieve all these quickly. You can simply use this class to create an ASCII serial connection to the component.

What is the specific role of the Communicator Framework?

Each component or device in an equipment provides a set of commands and responses to perform its designated function. The Communicator Framework includes a Transaction class that handles these commands; each command to a particular device is implemented as a transaction.

Consider the case of the Clamp activity for a loadport—the associated command could be “LOCK.” Now let’s see what are our tasks are to implement this command in a loadport driver as a CCF developer.

The first step is to create a Transaction class for the loadport which must be inherited from the base CCF Transaction class. See below for an example that creates the “Clamp” transaction.

In this example, the ClampTransaction class accepts the command Clamp as an attribute. The command which is passed as the attribute to its base class will be sent to the device through the ACSII serial connection.

The next step is to implement a Communicator class to send the command and receive responses from the device. See the sample code below.

The CCF product includes a LoadPort class. Here we initialize the Communicator class with the ASCII serial connection to perform the transaction.

When a clamp activity is needed, CCF calls the Clamp function of the LoadPort to do the clamping. We use the Communicator object just initialized to send the command to the hardware. Note that we did NOT write any code for sending the command or receiving its response because this is the job of the Communicator.  You send the command to the hardware by calling the PerformTransaction function of the Communicator base class as shown below.

Believe it or not… that’s it! We sent a command to the device with very few lines of code in the driver. Now, how do you handle responses from the device? Let’s have a look.

Each device implements different responses to the command set, depending on the manufacturer of that device. This may include acknowledgments, data items, events of various types, and so on. So, whenever the Communicator receives a response from the device, it calls an abstract method on a child class to parse the response. As a CCF developer you must decide what type of response it is, whether or not it successfully completes the transaction, and how to respond to the Communicator as a result.

The example below shows how to parse a response from the device.

Finally, how can we deal with the events from the hardware? From the code above you can see how to indicate that the type of response is an Event, and in this case, it will invoke another abstract method on its child class to handle the event. The CCF developer can then handle it in their code as shown below.

That’s all there is to it. The code segments above provide an example of a basic loadport driver that includes a Clamp transaction.  To implement additional commands for your device, simply add more transactions and call them from the equipment controller. The Communicator Framework will handle the rest of the communication with your device.

To learn more about CCF or other Cimetrix products, click the link below:

Background

The China summer SEMI Standards meeting was convened on August 8, 2023 in Shanghai. Two task forces met; the ABFI (Advanced Backend Factory Integration) and GEM300 Task force in the TC China Chapter. I actively participated in both task forces to closely monitor and comprehend all activities discussed during the meeting.

ABFI (Advanced Backend Factory Integration) Task Force

Ballot 7018, one Line Item revision to the SEMI E87-0921, Specification For Carrier Management(CMS) and E87.1-0921, Specification for SECS-II Protocol for Carrier Management(CMS).

It provides a means for the host or equipment to provide the slot map, which contains information regarding the correct and incorrect placement of substrates within a carrier. Additionally, it supports configuration settings that indicate the slot map is not read and will not be verified against host-provided information.  Furthermore, new related roundtrip scenarios are added to Related Information 1 – Carrier Object ID when the equipment lack the hardware for scanning a carrier’s slot map. This ballot was submitted for cycle-2 voting in February 2023 but received three rejections with a total of five negatives. During the ABFI Task Force meeting, we thoroughly reviewed and addressed these negative items.  Consequently, we will revise this ballot accordingly and submit it to the A&R committee for review. 

1. Line Item #1, Reject from Miyamoto Motoki (Yokogawa)
   • Negative 1 to Line Item #1 :  Accepted and do modification according to negative comments.
   • Negative 2 to Line Item #1-g : Accept and do modification according to negative comments.
2. Line Item #1 Reject from Matsuda Mitsuhiro (KKR)
   • Negative 1 to Document 7018 Line Item #1:  Negatives is not related with this ballot. This negative was not accepted by Task Force.
   • Negative 2 to Document 7018 Line Item #1:  Negatives is related but not persuasive. This negative was not accepted by Task Force.
3. Line Item #5 Reject No.1 from Mochizuki Tadashi (TEL)
   • After communication, voter withdrew the reject.

GEM 300 Task Force

In this task force we proposed two SNARFs, one for a line item revision to E40-1218, Specification For Processing Management, and another for E40.1-1218, Specification For SECS-II Protocol For Processing Management, and another for a line item revision to E94-0819R, Specification For Control Job Management and the E94.1-0819R, Specification For SECS-II Protocol For Control Job Management (CJM).
 
Some background information is useful here. In the semiconductor industry, the E90 Specification for Substrate Tracking, E40 and E94 are used together to monitor the substrate and job status in most 300mm frontend and advanced backend factories. Typically, after completing a job, it is the responsibility of the factory host to check the state of all materials to determine if the job has been successfully finished. However, some factories do not track E90 substrate events, and/or certain equipment types lack the capability to report such events. Additionally, some factories believe that the calculation of processed materials, failed materials and  unprocessed materials in a job should be performed on the equipment side, which then provides the final processed results. These factors make it challenging for the factory host to check the process status (processed, failed or unprocessed) of all materials in a job. As more straightforward data reporting requirements have accumulated from various factories, many equipment suppliers have developed their own means for delivering the processed substrate lists and counts. However, due to a lack of reference standards for these requirements and implementations, many variations exist in the data formats used to serve this single purpose.
 
These two SNARFs include revisions as follows to cover the above requirements and gaps:
1. Add new definitions for the Processed, Failed and Unprocessed state of materials.
2. Add a state matrix to better explain the E90 substrate processing states
3. Add new material processing result-related variables for job (process job and control job) events.
4. Add new object attributes for material processing result of job a (process job and control job) objects.
 

Note that these two SNARFs have undergone formal review, and ballots 7139 and 7140 were created as a result.

This blog provides a summary of the deliberations that took place during both task force meetings. For more information about these standards meetings, or questions about Cimetrix, please contact us by clicking the button below.