Enhancement of semiconductor equipment communications using a web-enabled equipment driver

Equipment communications are essential for semiconductor manufacturing automation. Equipment managers generally function to communicate between the manufacturing execution system (MES) and equipment. Connecting a different machine to the equipment manager requires modifying the associated equipment driver (ED) accordingly, which needs some efforts. To solve this problem, this study proposes a novel, web-enabled equipment driver (WED) that uses mobile object technology. Initially, a mobile object model with a Java applet, namely WED, is developed. WED is constructed on the equipment (server) side. Then, the equipment manager (client) downloads WED via a web browser. This process does not need to modify ED. Subsequently, the equipment manager can communicate with the equipment by either the Java socket technology using the high-speed SECS message services (HSMS) standard or the object web technology through the common object request broker architecture (CORBA) or distributed component object model (DCOM) protocols using the object-based equipment model (OBEM) standard. This proposed scheme has been successfully implemented. Illustrative examples reveal that the proposed mobile object model and WED establish a novel, efficient, and versatile scheme for semiconductor equipment communications.