Manufacturers address the distinct operational objectives of product innovation and manufacturing efficiency by having separate fabrication facilities (“fabs”) for development and manufacturing. Additionally, the industrial manufacture of a semiconductor product proceeds through several stages of production. These are typically a research and development (R&D) stage, a ramping stage, and a manufacturing stage. These production stages are distributed over the different fabs. These differences in fabrication environment and stage of production result in differences in the characteristics of production of a semiconductor product over its manufacturing lifetime. Some examples of these differences are device yield, breadth of processing conditions, throughput, number of reaction chambers operating in parallel, metrology, and data collection. These differences are reflected in the data available in the fab databases. This research explores the use of a neural network modeling and genetic algorithm optimization method with these different datasets. The focus is on a high-aspect-ratio etch process across the different fabs and production stages. Models are built from process input variables to post-process metrology, and from process input variables to yield metrics. In the latter case, there can be tens of processes occurring between the model input and output variables. I demonstrate the usefulness and industrial application of neural network process modeling and genetic algorithm recipe optimization by performing a reaction chamber matching exercise on a manufacturing line. The performance of a reaction chamber can deviate from target, either in terms of its post-process metrology or its associated yield metrics. The method developed herein generated an optimized recipe that brought the outlying behavior of a chamber closer to target and closer to that of the other chambers (“chamber matching”). This is one of many possible applications. It was chosen because it demonstrates both the fidelity of the process models and the effectiveness of the optimization algorithm.

Semiconductor manufacturing is characterized by a dynamic, varying environment and the technology to produce integrated circuits is always shifting in response to the demand for faster and new products, and the time between the development of a new profitable method of manufacturing and its transfer to tangible production is very short. The semiconductor industry has adopted the use of advanced process control (APC), namely a set of automated methodologies to reach desired process goals in operating individual process steps. That is because the ultimate motivation for APC is improved device yield and a typical semiconductor manufacturing process can have several hundred unit processes, any of which could be a yield limiter if a given unit procedure is out of control. APC uses information about the materials to be processed, metrology data, and the desired output results to choose which model and control plan to employ. The current focus of APC for semiconductor manufacturers is run-to-run control. Many metrology applications have become key enablers for the conventionally labeled “value-added” processing steps in lithography and etch and are now integral parts of these processes. The economic advantage of effective metrology applications increases with the difficulty of the manufacturing process. Frequent measurement facilitates products reaching its target but it increases the cost and cycle time. If lots of measurements are skipped, the product quality does not be guaranteed due to process error from uncompensated drift and step disturbance. Thus, it is necessary to optimize the sampling plan in order to quickly identify the sources of prediction errors and decrease the metrology cost and cycle time. The goal of this research intend to understand the relationship between metrology and advanced process control (APC) in semiconductor manufacturing and develop an enhanced sampling strategy in order to maximize the value of metrology and control for critical wafer features. / text

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In the sawmill industry, it can be very profitable to monitor the dimensions of sawn boards so that operators quickly can detect errors and take cor-rective action. In this master’s thesis project, Statistical Process Control (SPC) methods have been implemented to achieve this. SPC is a set of statistical methods whose purpose is to minimize the variations in an in-dustrial process. In particular, the SPC method used here is the control chart, which with an upper and lower control limit quantifies the bounds of natural variation. To find the most suitable control chart, five control charts monitoring the process mean, and two monitoring process variability were tested with help of both a simulation study and an empirical evaluation. The result of the evaluation was that the ”Average Moving Range” chart was regarded the most suitable for changes in process mean, and the Range chart was regarded as the best at detecting changes in process variability. Both charts are constructed for individual boards and not subgroups of boards (as is more common) due to compatibility reasons with the existing measurement practice. The two methods were deemed to be quite able to detect process changes, but some results indicate that the methods might work better for double arbour saw lines than single arbour ones. / Det kan vara mycket lönsamt för sågverk att övervaka mått på plankor så att personal snabbt kan hitta och åtgärda fel som uppstår i processen. I det syftet har det här masterarbetet gått ut på att implementera statistisk processkontroll (SPC) för råmåttkontroll på sågverk. SPC är en mängd olika statistiska metoder vars syfte är att minimera spridningen i en tillverkningsprocess. Den metod som är i speciellt focus i det här arbetet är det så kallade styrdiagrammet som med en övre och undre gräns kvantifierar hur stor den naturligt förekommande spridningen är. För att finna det mest lämpade styrdiagrammet utvärderades fem styrdiagram som övervakar processens medelvärde och två styrdiagram som övervakar processens spridning. Denna utvärdering bestod både av en simuleringsstudie och tester gjorda för empiriskt data. Utvärderingen resulterade i att det så kallade ”Average Moving Range” diagrammet rekommenderades för övervakning av medelvärde och ett räckviddsstyrdiagram rekommenderades för spridningen. Båda styrdiagrammen konstruerades för enskilda plankor och inte för stickprov av flera plankor (vilket är vanligare) på grund av kompatibelitetsskäl med gängse mätmetodik. De båda metoderna ansågs vara ganska bra på att upptäcka processförändringar men vissa resultat tyder på att metoderna kanske fungerar bättre för sågverk med mötande klingor än enaxliga sågverk.

This research addresses real-time task scheduling in industrial process control. It includes a constraint-based scheduler which is based on MSP.RTL, a tool for real-time multiprocessor scheduling problems with a wide variety of timing constraints. This dissertation extends previous work in two broad directions: improving the tool itself and broadening the application domain of the tool to include wired and wireless industrial process control. For the tool itself, we propose enhancements to MSP.RTL in three steps. In the first step, we modify the data structure for representing the temporal constraint graph and cutting the memory usage in half. In the second step, we model the search problem as a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) and utilize backmarking and conflict-directed backjumping to speed up the search process. In the third step, we perform the search from the perspective of constraint satisfaction programming. As a result, we are able to use existing CSP techniques efficiently, such as look ahead, backjumping and consistency checking. Compared to the various ad hoc heuristics used in the original version, the new approach is more systematic and powerful. To exercise the new MSP.RTL tool, we acquired an updated version of the Boeing 777 Integrated Airplane Information Management System(AIMS). This new benchmark problem is more complicated than the old one used in the original tool in that data communications are described in messages and a message can have multiple senders and receivers. The new MSP.RTL tool successfully solved the new benchmark problem, whereas the old tool would not be able to do so. In order to apply real-time scheduling in industrial process control, we carry out our research in two directions. First, we apply the improved tool to traditional wired process control. The tool has been successfully applied to solve the block assignment problem in Fieldbus networks, where each block comprising the control system is assigned to a specific device such that certain metrics of the system can be optimized. Wireless industrial control has received a lot of attention recently. We experimented with the tool to schedule communications on a simulated wireless industrial network. In order to integrate the scheduler in real wireless process control systems, we are building an experimental platform based on the WirelessHART standard. WirelessHART, as the first open wireless standard for process control, defines a time synchronized MAC layer, which is ideal for real time process control. We have successfully implemented a prototype WirelessHART stack on Freescale JM128 toolkits and built some demo applications on top of it. Even with the scheduler tool to regulate communications in a wireless process control, it may still be possible that communications cannot be established on an inferior wireless link within an expected period. In order to handle this type of failures, we propose to make the control modules aware of the unreliability of wireless links, that is, to make the control modules adapt to the varying link qualities. PID(Proportional, Integral, Derivative) modules are the most used control modules. We developed PIDPlus, an enhanced PID algorithm to cope with possible lost inputs and outputs. It has been shown that PIDPlus can drastically improve the stability of the control loop in cases of unreliable wireless communications. / text

In the recent years threaded run-to-run (RtR) control algorithms have experienced drawbacks under certain circumstances, one such trait is when applied to high-mix of products such as in Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) foundries. The variations in the process are a function of the product being manufactured as well as the tool being used. The presence of semiconductor layers increases the number of times the lithography process must be repeated. Successive layers having different patterns must be exposed using different reticles/masks in order to maximize tool utilizations. The objectives of this research are to develop a set of methodologies for evaluation and extension of threaded control applied to overlay. This project defines methods to quantify the efficacy of threaded controls, finds the drawbacks of threaded control under production of high mix of semiconductors and suggests extensions and alternatives to improve threaded control. To evaluate the performance of threaded control, extensive simulations were performed in MATLAB. The effects of noise, disturbances, sampling and delays on the control and estimation performance of threaded controller were studied through these simulations. Based on the results obtained, several ideas to extend threaded control by reducing overall number of threads, by improving thread definitions and combination have been introduced. A unique idea of sampling the measurements dynamically based on the estimation accuracy is also presented. Future work includes implementing the extensions to threaded control suggested in this work in real production data and comparing the results without the use of those methods. Future work also includes building new alternatives to threaded control. / text

The fabrication of semiconductor devices is a highly competitive and capital intensive industry. Due to the high costs of building wafer fabrication facilities (fabs), it is expected that products should be made efficiently with respect to both time and material, and that expensive unit operations (tools) should be utilized as much as possible. The process flow is characterized by frequent machine failures, drifting tool states, parallel processing, and reentrant flows. In addition, the competitive nature of the industry requires products to be made quickly and within tight tolerances. All of these factors conspire to make both the scheduling of product flow through the system and the control of product quality metrics extremely difficult. Up to now, much research has been done on the two problems separately, but until recently, interactions between the two systems, which can sometimes be detrimental to one another, have mostly been ignored. The research contained here seeks to tackle the scheduling problem by utilizing objectives based on control system parameters in order that the two systems might behave in a more beneficial manner. A non-threaded control system is used that models the multi-tool, multi-product process in a state space form, and estimates the states using a Kalman filter. Additionally, the process flow is modeled by a discrete event simulation. The two systems are then merged to give a representation of the overall system. Two control system matrices, the estimate error covariance matrix from the Kalman filter and a square form of the system observability matrix called the information matrix, are used to generate several control-based scheduling algorithms. These methods are then tested against more tradition approaches from the scheduling literature to determine their effectiveness on both the basis of how well they maintain the outputs near their targets and how well they minimize the cycle time of the products in the system. The two metrics are viewed simultaneously through use of Pareto plots and merits of the various scheduling methods are judged on the basis of Pareto optimality for several test cases. / text

Bayesian process control is a statistical process control (SPC) scheme that uses the posterior state probabilities as the control statistic. The key issue is to decide when to restore the process based on real-time observations. Such problems have been extensively studied in the framework of partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP), with particular emphasis on the structure of optimal control policy. Almost all existing structural results on the optimal policies are limited to the two-state processes, where the class of control-limit policy is optimal. However, the two-state model is a gross simplification, as real production processes almost always involve multiple states. For example, a machine in the production system often has multiple failure modes differing in their effects; the deterioration process can often be divided into multiple stages with different degradation levels; the condition of a complex multi-unit system also requires a multi-state representation. We investigate the optimal control policies for multi-state processes with fixed sampling scheme, in which information about the process is represented by a belief vector within a high dimensional probability simplex. It is well known that obtaining structural results for such high-dimensional POMDP is challenging. Firstly, we prove that for an infinite-horizon process subject to multiple competing assignable causes, a so-called conditional control limit policy is optimal. The optimal policy divides the belief space into two individually connected regions, which have analytical bounds. Next, we address a finite-horizon process with at least one absorbing state and show that a structured optimal policy can be established by transforming the belief space into a polar coordinate system, where a so-called polar control limit policy is optimal. Our model is general enough to include many existing models in the literature as special cases. The structural results also lead to significantly efficient algorithms for computing the optimal policies. In addition, we characterize the condition for some out-of-control state to be more desirable than the in-control state. The existence of such counterintuitive situation indicates that multi-state process control is drastically different from the two-state case.

Bayesian process control is a statistical process control (SPC) scheme that uses the posterior state probabilities as the control statistic. The key issue is to decide when to restore the process based on real-time observations. Such problems have been extensively studied in the framework of partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP), with particular emphasis on the structure of optimal control policy. Almost all existing structural results on the optimal policies are limited to the two-state processes, where the class of control-limit policy is optimal. However, the two-state model is a gross simplification, as real production processes almost always involve multiple states. For example, a machine in the production system often has multiple failure modes differing in their effects; the deterioration process can often be divided into multiple stages with different degradation levels; the condition of a complex multi-unit system also requires a multi-state representation. We investigate the optimal control policies for multi-state processes with fixed sampling scheme, in which information about the process is represented by a belief vector within a high dimensional probability simplex. It is well known that obtaining structural results for such high-dimensional POMDP is challenging. Firstly, we prove that for an infinite-horizon process subject to multiple competing assignable causes, a so-called conditional control limit policy is optimal. The optimal policy divides the belief space into two individually connected regions, which have analytical bounds. Next, we address a finite-horizon process with at least one absorbing state and show that a structured optimal policy can be established by transforming the belief space into a polar coordinate system, where a so-called polar control limit policy is optimal. Our model is general enough to include many existing models in the literature as special cases. The structural results also lead to significantly efficient algorithms for computing the optimal policies. In addition, we characterize the condition for some out-of-control state to be more desirable than the in-control state. The existence of such counterintuitive situation indicates that multi-state process control is drastically different from the two-state case.