Due to technological development and miniaturization complex manufacturing in semiconductors industry has seen a further increase of complexity in their technologies in the past decades. Amongst other issues the number of process steps raised. More tool recipes have to be developed, tested and maintained. The number of recipes furthermore increases together with an increasing product mix.

In our days a process is often no longer defined only by a recipe name, but by a large number of "objects" like e.g. equipment parameters, constants, set ups and a unique recipe body file. This dependency on various recipe objects leads to a high risk of faulty processing because of

• the selection of a wrong recipe body or a wrong recipe name
• the selection of a wrong recipe version
• usage of a recipe body having wrong content
• missing or wrong equipment parameters
• etc.

All this information needs to be administered, managed and saved in a central place. In addition a versioning system is required which requests adequate approval from process owners before any new or changed recipe can be used in production.

A universal Recipe Management System (RMS) - LineWorks RM from camLine - is our answer to the challenge to minimize the risk of faulty processing. It is designed to enable the management and storage of even complex recipes including all objects and their relations, which define a process step, in a central and secured database. LineWorks RM links the recipe (recipe object) to an unique production step, an engineering run, an equipment or a lot. It also records any change that engineers apply to improve the process (versioning). Furthermore it requests approval from the persons in charge in order to validate and release any new recipe or recipe version for production.

For more details on the camLine solution for RMS, see the LineWorks RM product information.