Modeling and emulation of a furnace in IC fab based oncolored-timed Petri net

摘要

In integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing, the wafer processingntakes more time in furnaces than other equipment. How to effectivelynintegrate furnaces with other automated machines is very important. Innparticular, using the real furnace for testing not only introducesntrouble but also wastes time. This paper aims to model and construct annemulation environment for the furnace. The colored timed Petri netn(CTPN) is used to model the furnace. Based on CTPN, the dynamicnbehaviors of the furnace, such as loading, processing, unloading andnwafer count mismatching, can be emulated. The proposed CTPN model isnhierarchical and modular. The hierarchical architecture is built byndividing the behaviors of the furnace to make the model more compact andnthe modular modeling makes the model flexible and easy to use. On thenother hand, the furnace emulator provides a quasi environment forntesting so that potential problems of the system can be detected innadvance and the testing time can be economized