Collaborative Knowledge Management for Manufacturing Recipes

Thin-film fabrication processes for semiconductors, MEMS, etc., use a broad spectrum of different process technologies and a diverse mix of used materials. The details of the manufacturing recipes represent an important body of knowledge. Unlike in microelectronics, the MEMS fabrication process is, in most cases, application-specific, and therefore an integral part of the application design. The high amount of different step variants, the long chains of steps required for a complete manufacturing flow, the knowledge of the individual steps, the interactions between used manufacturing steps, and the dos and don’ts of chaining them together are the secret sauce for manufacturing success and the competitive edge.

Discovering the correct combination of process steps, materials, and process parameters usually requires many expensive and time-consuming experiments. But the multitude of manufacturing steps used in product manufacturing is only a very small fraction of the recipes existing in a company. The plethora of processing steps used only once in an R&D institute or university requires even more careful management. This use case study presents a project with a research institute applying a specialized software system to perform holistic Research Data Management [Wisconsin 2021].

It supports the MEMS device and process designers in managing their process knowledge, especially their detailed recipe knowledge. They use the software system to assemble and verify their new or amended fabrication processes in a virtual fabrication environment, thus reducing the number of real-world experiments to a minimum.