Potentials of condition based monitoring in semiconductor manufacturing

Today, the majority of semiconductor fabrication plants (Fabs) conduct equipment preventive maintenance based on statistically derived time-based or wafer count based intervals. While these practices have had relative success in managing equipment availability and managing product yield, the costs, both in time and materials remains high. Condition Based Monitoring (CBM) has been successfully adopted in several industries, where costs associated with equipment downtime range from loss of life to unacceptable affects to companies' bottom line. In this paper, we will investigate a method of CBM to semiconductor manufacturing that addresses some of the issues of CBM in complex systems with multiple operating regimes.