IOT-based in situ condition monitoring of semiconductor fabrication equipment for e-maintenance
Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering
ISSN: 1355-2511
Article publication date: 5 August 2021
Issue publication date: 11 October 2022
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) solution to improve the equipment condition monitoring with equipment status data and process condition monitoring with plasma optical emission spectroscopy data, simultaneously. The suggested research contributes e-maintenance capability by remote monitoring in real time.
Design/methodology/approach
Semiconductor processing equipment consists of more than a thousand of components, and unreliable condition of equipment parts leads to the failure of wafer production. This study presents a web-based remote monitoring system for physical vapor deposition (PVD) systems using programmable logic controller (PLC) and Modbus protocol. A method of obtaining electron temperature and electron density in plasma through optical emission spectroscopy (OES) is proposed to monitor the plasma process. Through this system, parts that affect equipment and processes can be controlled and properly managed. It is certainly beneficial to improve the manufacturing yield by reducing errors from equipment parts.
Findings
A web-based remote monitoring system provides much of benefits to equipment engineers to provide equipment data for the equipment maintenance even though they are physically away from the equipment side. The usefulness of IIoT for the e-maintenance in semiconductor manufacturing domain with the in situ monitoring of plasma parameters is convinced. The authors found the average electron temperature gradually with the increase of Ar carrier gas flow due to the increased atomic collisions in PVD process. The large amount of carrier gas flow, in this experimental case, was 90 sccm, dramatically decreasing the electron temperature, which represents kinetic energy of electrons.
Research limitations/implications
Semiconductor industries require high level of data security for the protection of their intellectual properties, and it also falls into equipment operational condition; however, data security through the Internet communication is not considered in this research, but it is already existing technology to be easily adopted by add-on feature.
Practical implications
The findings indicate that crucial equipment parameters are the amount of carrier gas flow rate and chamber pressure among the many equipment parameters, and they also affect plasma parameters of electron temperature and electron density, which directly affect the quality of metal deposition process result on wafer. Increasing the gas flow rate beyond a certain limit can yield the electron temperature loss to have undesired process result.
Originality/value
Several research studies on data mining with semiconductor equipment data have been suggested in semiconductor data mining domain, but the actual demonstration of the data acquisition system with real-time plasma monitoring data has not been reported. The suggested research is also valuable in terms of high cost and complicated equipment manufacturing.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Korea Institute of Advanced Technology (KIAT) grant funded by Korea Government (MOTIE). (P0008458, The Competency Development Program for Specialist.) and LINC + Semiconductor Equipment Engineering program in Myongji University granted funded by Ministry of Education. Authors are grateful to AdvanTech Korea for the holding an Advantech Internet of Things (AIoT) student competition in 2019 and 2020.
Citation
Lee, Y.J., Kwon, H.J., Seok, Y. and Hong, S.J. (2022), "IOT-based in situ condition monitoring of semiconductor fabrication equipment for e-maintenance", Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering, Vol. 28 No. 4, pp. 736-747. https://doi.org/10.1108/JQME-10-2020-0113
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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