National Coalition for Advanced Manufacturing (NACFAM) [12] stated in 2001 that in the e‐Manufacturing era, companies will be able to exchange information of all types with their suppliers at the speed of light. Also, design cycle times and intercompany costs of manufacturing complex products will implode. Information on design flows will be instantly transmitted from repair shops to manufacturers and their supply chains.
Figure 1.1 shows the e‐Manufacturing hierarchy created by the international SEMATECH (ISMT) [4]. This hierarchy can be divided into the manufacturing portion and the engineering portion. In Figure 1.1, MES is a core system in the manufacturing portion that connects its upper factory‐to‐factory modules and lower equipment modules to dominate the overall manufacturing management. The highest (company‐to‐company) layer in the manufacturing portion is mainly for the purpose of SC. On the other hand, EES takes charge of the engineering portion that deals with equipment health monitoring, real‐time quality control, and maintenance scheduling (e.g. e‐diagnostics [15, 16]).
Figure 1.1 ISMT e‐Manufacturing hierarchy.
Source: Reprinted with permission from Ref. [14]; © 2010 IEEE.
In the semiconductor manufacturing industry, Tag and Zhang [13] defined e‐Manufacturing as the complete electronic integration of all factory components using industry standards. This e‐Manufacturing model extends from equipment‐to‐equipment automation systems to the manufacturing execution system/yield management system/equipment engineering system (MES/YMS/EES) and to the enterprise resource planning (ERP).
The ISMT e‐Manufacturing hierarchy shown in Figure 1.1 [4] merely takes care of the functions of MES, EES, and SC without EC. Another model defined in [13] also takes the related functions of MES, EES, and SC into consideration only.
To consider all of the functions and applications of MES, SC, EES, and EC simultaneously, and enhance the integrity of e‐Manufacturing as shown in Figure 1.2, Cheng et al. [14] proposed an advanced e‐Manufacturing model that takes advantage of the information and Internet technologies to efficiently integrate the MES and EES within a company (intra‐company integration), and the SC and EC among member companies (inter‐company integration). With this advanced e‐Manufacturing model, the productivity and yield of a complete production platform can be improved (by MES), the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) can be enhanced (by EES), the order‐to‐delivery (O2D) period can be reduced (by SC), and the time‐to‐market (T2M) can be shortened (by EC). Furthermore, the goal of improving agility, efficiency, and decision‐making for the entire semiconductor manufacturing processes can be reached.
Figure 1.2 Four key components for the advanced e‐Manufacturing model.
Source: Reprinted with permission from Ref. [14]; © 2010 IEEE.
In the advanced e‐Manufacturing model, both the MES and SC belong to the manufacturing portion, whereas the EES and EC are closely related to the engineering portion. The proposed e‐Manufacturing model fully integrates the four key components (MES, EES, SC, and EC) to enhance the globalization and competitiveness of the semiconductor industry. The definitions, missions, primary issues, and feasible implementation frameworks of the four key components of e‐Manufacturing are discussed in the following sections.
1.2.1.1 Manufacturing Execution System (MES)
The MES is a shop floor control system which includes either manual or automatic labor and production reporting as well as on‐line inquiries and links to tasks that take place on the production floor. The MES provides links to work orders, receipt of goods, shipping, quality control, maintenance, scheduling, and other related tasks [17]. The mission of MES is to increase productivity and yield.
Figure 1.3 presents the MES operation procedures in semiconductor manufacturing. In Figure 1.3, a front opening unified pod (FOUP), containing 25 wafers, is processed via lithography, etching, and implantation. After finishing its procedures in the lithography process, the FOUP is prepared for the etching process by the MES. First, the MES client requires a material control system (MCS) to move the FOUP to the process equipment. When the FOUP arrives at the etching equipment, the equipment manager sends a message to notify the MES, reads the information of work in process (WIP), acquires a recipe for this FOUP from the recipe management (RM) system, and initiates fabrication. Next, the equipment manager sends the process data of each wafer under fabrication to the statistical process control (SPC) server for quality monitoring. Eventually, the equipment manager updates the WIP information when the etching process completes and asks the MCS to move the FOUP from the etching equipment to the implantation equipment.
Figure 1.3 MES operation procedures.
Source: Reprinted with permission from Ref. [14]; © 2010 IEEE.
Notably, ISMT developed a SEMATECH computer‐integrated manufacturing (CIM) framework (Figure 1.4) [1] to specify the common MES infrastructure and the software functions of MES applications, and incorporate those MES applications into a coherent system. By specifying the standard interfaces and behaviors of the common MES components, manufacturers can collect system components from multiple suppliers. Thus, manufacturers can develop systems by extending the common components and substituting old components with improved ones of the same interfaces and behaviors.
Figure 1.4 Functional architecture of the ISMT CIM framework.
Source: Reprinted with permission from Ref. [14]; © 2010 IEEE.
The SEMATECH CIM framework is an abstract model for typical semiconductor manufacturing systems. This CIM framework is developed based on open‐distributed system and object technologies. However, the fragility and security problems are not considered in this framework. For these reasons, Cheng et al. [3] adopted the concepts of holon and holarchy to propose a holonic manufacturing execution system (HMES) framework that is also suitable for industrial application (Figure 1.5). The HMES framework not only owns the characters of open‐distributed system and object technologies but also has the properties of failure recovery and security certification.
