Lfoundry Does the Impossible! Flips Switch on MES & Migrations to Eyelit

Problem: LFoundry (“LFoundry”), a semiconductor foundry, a vendor for the automotive and industrial sectors, located in Avezzano, Italy, migrated away from its existing legacy MES system which was deeply ingrained in the day-to-day operations of the fab.

Eyelit Technologies (“Eyelit”), having experience in several MES migrations, was brought in to help convert the facility that specializes in the manufacturing of image sensors and other analog and mixed-signal technologies. Eyelit MES™ was chosen as the solution to drive change in many areas including, WIP processing control, traceability, automation management, change management, and other critical in-house functional departmental solutions.

A high mix/high volume facility, LFoundry offers advanced manufacturing services, including 150nm and 110nm process technologies, and has a production capacity of over 40,000 wafers per month. “The volume alone is very high and then add a migration, with a lot of complexity, and we were faced with a very, very big challenge.”, stated Tiziano Laconelli, ICT Manager for LFoundry. “The company took a vested interest from many internal departments to provide requirements and work with Eyelit on the many intrical ways we do business day to day and operate in and outside the fab.”

Solution: As part of the discovery phase, a deep gap analysis was used to determine how to map existing functionality to the composable applications making up the extended Eyelit Manufacturing MES Suite™, which was purpose built for Semiconductor manufacturing.

Eyelit Technologies replaced, embraced and/or extended the following functional modules:

• Factory Connect / APC – Advanced Process Control
• Automation Interface – MES to Automation Interface
• QMS – Quality Management for Approval Processes (e.g. OCAP)
• SPC – Real Time Statistical Process Control
• MES / Q-TIME – Queue Timer Management
• MES / RFID – System to track physical locations of fab objects
• AM – Asset Management Maintenance
• Factory Connect – High-Speed, High-Volume Tool Data Collection, Summarization, and Anomaly Detection
• VPD – Vendor Packaged Datasets
• Digital Twin – For Staging Production
• AM Spare Parts Management – Kits Management, Quartz Management
• Recipe Management System – Generic Recipe Manager
• Asset Management Durables – Durables, Reticles, Reticle Pods, Probe Cards and Wet Quartz Management
• MES Probe Central – Probe operations overview
• SPC Sigma – Data Analysis Software for SPC
• MES / WIP – WIP Control and Coordination
• SWR – Special Work Request, Experiment Management
• MES / XMS – Exception Management
• MES Inhibition/Dedications – Flow Control

High-Volume Architecture, A Must Have!

Beyond the necessary functionality was the infrastructure necessary to support the high mix and volume facility. Eyelit’s proven architecture ramped up to support millions of transactions per week, management of terabytes of data and a required 99.999 uptime solution.

Using proprietary software clustering capabilities and archive/purge module, Eyelit worked with the LFoundry team to keep the system fast with little latency, a challenge given the number of check points on each transaction. Being an automotive supplier it was vitally important that LFoundry is able to export historical data to be kept available offline for years