Semiconductor Legacy MES Limitation
LFoundry, a semiconductor foundry, a vendor for the automotive and industrial sectors, located in Avezzano, Italy, migrated away from its existing Micron legacy MES system which was deeply ingrained in the day-to-day operations of the fab.
High Volume MES Solution
As part of the discovery phase Eyelit Technologies worked with the LFoundry team to uncover the scope of the current Micron system in order to meet the requirements. A deep gap analysis was used to determine how to map existing functionality to the composable applications making up the extended Eyelit Technologies MES solution, which was purpose built for Semiconductor manufacturing.
Eyelit Technologies, having experience in several MES migrations including a similar migration at a previously owned Micron fab in Japan, was brought in to help convert the facility that specializes in the manufacturing of image sensors and other analog and mixed-signal technologies. Eyelit Technologies MES solution 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 Technologies on the many intrical ways we do business day to day and operate in and outside the fab.”
Eyelit Technologies replaced, embraced and/or extended the following functional modules:
- 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 Mgmt
- 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
- Factory Connect – High-Speed, High-Volume Tool Data Collection, Summarization, and Anomaly Detection
- VPD – Vendor Packaged Datasets
- 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
Figure 1 – Eyelit Technologies provided an unparalleled breadth of functionality that spanned several business applications
High-Volume Architecture, A Must Have!
Beyond the necessary functionality was the infrastructure necessary to support the high mix and volume facility. Eyelit Technologies’ proven architecture ramped up to support a millions of transactions per day, management of terabytes of data and a required 99.999 uptime solution.
Using proprietary software clustering capabilities and archive/purge module, Eyelit Technologies 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 maintain 7 years of online data.
Figure 2 – Clustering and Service-based, distributed architecture to enable high transactional throughput