Advancing Towards Factory-Wide Data Quality for APC Applications

Published

September 30, 2006

Author(s)

Harvey Wohlwend, Gino Crispieri, Ya-Shian Li-Baboud

Abstract

Advancing to the next levels of Advanced Process Control (APC) requires the ability to intelligently merge existing and new data sources in order to refine semiconductor manufacturing. To fully exploit the acquired data points for analyses in APC applications, the context information accompanying the data must be accurate. Accurate clock synchronization and time stamping plays a significant role in ensuring data quality as the semiconductor industry faces an imminent data explosion with the deployment of Interface A. Standards can significantly ease the deployment of factory-wide distributed system synchronization where a plethora of equipment and applications from a variety of vendors exist. The SEMI Time Synchronization Working Group identified the industry?s critical timing requirements and addressed the challenges by developing new standards and guidelines while ensuring legacy standards can adopt the new standard and maintain backwards compatibility. This presentation provides insight to the motivations and key concepts for a time synchronization standard and reports on experiences doing evaluations of Interface A implementations. These experiences highlight additional insights possible with Interface A, including the internal senor data value refresh rate. Interface A provides more fine grained data collection, more visibility into the data, and a window into the industry?s data quality issues.

Proceedings Title

AEC/APC Symposium XVIII

Conference Dates

September 30-October 5, 2006

Conference Location

Westminster, CO, USA

Pub Type

Conferences

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Keywords

advanced process control, data quality, semiconductor manufacturing, time synchronization

Citation

Wohlwend, H. , Crispieri, G. and Li-Baboud, Y. (2006), Advancing Towards Factory-Wide Data Quality for APC Applications, AEC/APC Symposium XVIII, Westminster, CO, USA, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=32423 (Accessed October 13, 2025)