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RACE MCS™
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Industry-Specific Solution
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If you’ve worked in high-tech manufacturing, you know how important it is to maintain tight and responsive process control. Small variations in equipment behavior, raw materials including chemical inputs, or environmental factors like temperature can affect production, impacting yield and quality.
SmartSPC supports manufacturers by automating Run-to-Run (R2R) control and helping to manage these variables with less manual intervention.
The Building Blocks: What’s Under the Hood?
To understand how SmartSPC works, it’s useful to look at the key components and how they collaborate to enable automated process control.
Real-Time Data Collection
Effective R2R control starts with accurate and timely data from your production process. LineWorks SPACE collects data from production lines in real time, handling metrology, process, and controller-calculated data. It ensures the data is validated and ready for analysis.
Recipe Management System (RMS)
LineWorks RM manages your recipes—the detailed instructions your equipment follows. It stores all important parameters and constants, organized neatly in what we call Recipe Objects (ROBs), which ensures traceability and easy updates.
Advanced Calculation Option (ACO)
Advanced Calculation Option (ACO) is a key component within LineWorks SPACE that enables automated process tuning through advanced data calculations for parameter optimization. These calculations are configurable for each specific use case.
Recipe Objects (ROBs)
Recipe Objects (ROBs), managed within LineWorks RM, store critical process and equipment parameters, as well as retrieve optimized parameter values for recipe adjustments.
RM Integration Layer (RIL)
The RM Integration Layer (RIL) acts as the messenger, ensuring that all updates and calculations flow smoothly between LineWorks SPACE, LineWorks RM, and your equipment controllers.
Equipment Interface (EI)
The Equipment Interface (EI) connects SmartSPC with manufacturing equipment, allowing real-time updates of process parameters across different vendors and equipment types. It is essential for exchanging data directly with your process and measurement devices.
How Does R2R Control Work in SmartSPC?
R2R control is an ongoing feedback loop that adjusts process parameters based on production data.
Modeling
Your process engineers set up the key parameters and define how they relate to each other for optimized control. It’s like building a smart map of your process, outlining what can change and how.
These parameters might include exposure dose, focus settings, temperature, pressure, or chemical concentrations depending on your process.
Data Collection
During production, LineWorks SPACE captures data from each run, and after filtering out noise and outliers, feeds it to ACO for calculation. The calculated results are then applied to the previously defined model.
Feedback and Adjustment
ACO crunches the data using its models and determines exactly what needs tweaking. Then, via recipe management in LineWorks RM and RIL, those adjustments are sent to your equipment for the next production run.
This feedback loop compensates for process variations caused by changes in equipment condition, material variability, or environmental factors.
What Makes SmartSPC Different?
As high-tech manufacturing processes become increasingly complex, classical single-variable feedback control methods are no longer sufficient. Traditional SPC approaches often rely on manual tuning and sequential adjustments of individual parameters, which can be slow and less effective.
To address this, SmartSPC was developed with integrated feedforward and feedback control mechanisms. It automatically determines the optimal recipe for each wafer by considering both incoming wafer properties and the current state of the production tools.
SmartSPC stands out by:
- Managing multiple parameters simultaneously and accounting for their interactions.
- Allowing tuning frequency to be tailored to the specific needs of production.
- Scaling to support a wide range of parameters and factory sizes.
- Keeping detailed logs of all changes to support traceability and troubleshooting.
Explore SmartSPC core components and its capabilities here.
What Value Does SmartSPC Bring to Your Business?
By utilizing SmartSPC, high-tech manufacturers can achieve more consistent processes with fewer manual interventions. Improvements in process capability (Cpk), reduced defect rates, and faster responses to production changes are common results.
The system supports operators and process engineers by providing timely, data-driven adjustments that help maintain stable, efficient, and predictable manufacturing performance.
Conclusion
SmartSPC combines real-time data collection from LineWorks SPACE, recipe management from LineWorks RM, and advanced calculation capabilities to deliver automated R2R process control. This integrated approach helps manufacturers manage process variations efficiently while maintaining consistent production quality and standards.
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