Equipment Control
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 SEMI standard GEM interface that can be easily integrated to the factory host. The environment provides the automation solution developer with a host of services realized by highly reliable modules such as I/O System, 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:
I/O System
This provides the user with a hardware abstraction thereby providing easy adaptability across hardware. Some of the salient features are:
- Easy Configurability
- High performance
- Interface for reading and writing I/O
- Engineering unit conversion
- Provides change based reporting
User level drivers for hardware adaptability
A set of templates for developing I/O 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
- Publisher Subscriber Model
Cluster Scheduler
This module schedules material for processing within an equipment with an aim to maximum throughput, prevents 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
