A practical approach to equipment reliability enhancement

When equipment manufacturers conduct reliability enhancement testing, customer process development, and engineering testing, the resource investment needed to support all three efforts can be significant. FSI International operates a unique equipment reliability enhancement program that allows simultaneous process development, reliability and engineering testing. The program groups all three test objectives with the following advantages: 1) Greater operating efficiency gained by multi-tasking a single lab tool; 2) Considerable capital and operating expense savings; and 3) Accelerated learning cycles and quality improvement. The FSI program is based on SEMI E10-92, the Motorola IRONMAN equipment test philosophy, and customer equipment evaluation guidelines. The main principle of the FSI reliability program is continuous 24-hour operation of the tool. Process data is collected at regular intervals and system reliability is tracked continuously. The original program goals were system MTBF/spl ges/1000 hrs. and total system uptime exceeding 99%, while maintaining the tool for engineering and customer application work. The advantages of continuous testing are twofold. First, the equipment design becomes more robust and better able to meet future customer process requirements. Second, a database is created that characterizes the machine on a long-term basis and allows better process predictions to be made. The paper details the testing methodology adopted for this reliability program. It reviews the troubleshooting and corrective action procedure, the status of the program, and summarize the results.