Enhancement of semiconductor equipment communications using aweb-enabled equipment driver

摘要

Equipment communications are essential for semiconductornmanufacturing automation. Equipment managers generally function toncommunicate between the manufacturing execution system (MES) andnequipment. Connecting a different machine to the equipment managernrequires modifying the associated equipment driver (ED) accordingly,nwhich needs some efforts. To solve this problem, this study proposes annovel, web-enabled equipment driver (WED) that uses mobile objectntechnology. Initially, a mobile object model with a Java applet, namelynWED, is developed. WED is constructed on the equipment (server) side.nThen, the equipment manager (client) downloads WED via a web browser.nThis process does not need to modify ED. Subsequently, the equipmentnmanager can communicate with the equipment by either the Java socketntechnology using the high-speed SECS message services (HSMS) standard ornthe object web technology through the common object request brokernarchitecture (CORBA) or distributed component object model (DCOM)nprotocols using the object-based equipment model (OBEM) standard. Thisnproposed scheme has been successfully implemented. Illustrative examplesnreveal that the proposed mobile object model and WED establish a novel,nefficient, and versatile scheme for semiconductor equipmentncommunications