When a leading global manufacturer of semiconductor fab equipment control solutions
wanted to develop a software framework for equipment control
they found the perfect partner in NeST. The customer wanted
the product to have characteristics such as high reliability,
high performance, high throughput, easy maintainability, and
reduced development time.
NeST Solution
NeST developed an architecture, which solved many of the
difficult problems such as wafer scheduling, WIP tracking
and Host Interfaces. The product provides a highly intuitive
user interface with multi-lingual support. It comes factory
ready with a Standard GEM Interface that can easily integrate
to the factory host. The environment provides the automation
solution developer with a host of services realized by highly
reliable modules such as Hardware Interface, Exception Manager,
Scheduler and Message Manager.
Benefits to Customer
- Quality product with all expected features.
- Product development and support at a fraction of the
cost
- Reduced Time to market
The major features of the solution are given below:
Hardware Interface Sub System
This provides the user with a hardware abstraction thereby
providing easy adaptability across hardware. The salient features
are
- Easy Configurability
- High performance
- Provides client interface for reading and writing I/O
- Engineering unit conversion
- Provides change based reporting
User level drivers for hardware adaptability
Provides a template for developing
drivers
User Interface
Sub System
This is the runtime user view of the equipment. It provides
with a highly intuitive, multi-lingual graphical user interface.
It provides
- Real-time animation support
- High performance
- Multi-lingual support with hot swapping
- Built-in user management
- Provides a template for screen development
- Hierarchical ordering of user screens
Event Sub System
This manages messages in the system generated by different
modules. Key features are
- Easy configurability
- High performance
- Guaranteed message delivery
- Uses Publisher Subscriber Model
Cluster Scheduler
This module schedules material for processing within an equipment
with an aim to maximum throughput, prevenst deadlock and optimizes
resource usage. Salient features of the module are
- SEMI CTMC standards compliant
- Highly Configurable
- Supports various material flows like parallel, serial,
concurrent etc
- Support for lot control functions.
- Manual movement support.
- Supports WIP tracking
Host interface
This sub system implements the SEMI E30 (GEM) standard compliant host interface
- Provides full GEM compliance to the environment
- Easy integration to other control systems
- Can be configured to be a pass through controller
Graphical Flow Charting Tool
This module provides a visual meta-programming
environment letting users develop their own control logic
represented as a flow chart. The key features are
- Visual programming with drag and drop graphical user
interface
- Designed for high performance
- Runs in complied mode
- Remote debugging
- Remote invocation
- Interactive flow chart builder
