Benchmarking of commercial software for fault detection and classification (FDC) of plasma etchers for semiconductor manufacturing equipment

In order to evaluate the performance of a large number of commercial FDC software, we conducted a benchmarking study at SEMATECH. The purpose of this paper is to report the tool data and the procedures that we were successfully able to use to benchmark the FDC software. These procedures can be used to compare FDC software based on similar or different principals. The results from this benchmarking have allowed the SEMATECH member companies to choose the software for beta-testing in the production environment. We conducted the benchmarking, by using the tool data obtained from three SEMATECH member companies, Texas Instruments, MOTOROLA and Lucent Technologies. Tool data was put on a secured FTP site with the instructions for solving the benchmarking problems. The software suppliers downloaded the data, analyzed the data and returned the results within the specified time-limits. The best results indicated that it may be possible to predict the tool faults in advance.