Novellus Systems Incorporated

Jaideep Jain

Steve Kleinke

Jeffery William Achtnig

Qiang Zhou

Russell Fleming

Sofya B Malitsky

Stanley P Liu

Janet Yi

Eileen A H Wong

Thomas Hentschel

Disclosed are apparatus and methods for monitoring an operation parameter of a process tool, independently of a process system recipe, are provided. In one embodiment, the behavior of a process device as it transitions between different states is monitored for a single cycle of operation or over time to detect trends that indicate a potential failure of the process device. When a trend that indicates a potential failure is detected, an alarm is generated. In one implementation, the time for reaching a particular stage of operation may be repeatedly monitored over a plurality of device cycles. For example, the time to open a valve or door may be monitored. In another example, the time for reaching a stable phase of gas flow after a ramping stage has commenced is monitored. When the time for reaching a particular stage begins to decline by a predetermined amount, an alarm may be generated.

Apparatus and methods for monitoring health of semiconductor process systems

Disclosed are apparatus and methods for embodiments for efficiently and flexibly controlling hardware devices in a semiconductor processing system are provided for use in a distributed control arrangement. In general, the distributed arrangement includes at least one upper-level controller that is configurable with a computer program sequence of instructions for controlling one or more hardware devices of a processing tool. The hardware devices are controlled through one or more lower-level controllers. Prior to execution of the program sequence of the upper-level controller, at least one instruction of this program is pre-compiled so as to translate the instruction for execution by a selected lower-level controller and to add an at least one interlock check to such pre-compiled instruction and make the translated instruction accessible to at least one lower-level controller. The interlock check specifies one or more condition(s) for the selected lower-level controller to execute the pre-compiled instruction. Any number of instructions of the upper-level controller may be translated for use by any number of selected lower-level controllers, where some of the translated instructions include one or more interlock checks.

Apparatus and methods for precompiling program sequences processing for wafer processing

Disclosed are apparatus and methods for monitoring an operation parameter of a process tool, independently of a process system recipe, are provided. In general, an indirect effect that results from implementing an event from a process system recipe on the process system is monitored without using the specific values or setpoints that are entered for such event into the process system to thereby change a state of such process system. In one embodiment, the behavior of a process device as it transitions between different states is monitored for a single cycle of operation or over time to detect trends that indicate a potential failure of the process device. When a trend that indicates a potential failure is detected, an alarm is generated. In one implementation, the time for reaching a particular stage of operation may be repeatedly monitored over a plurality of device cycles. For example, the time to open a valve or door may be monitored. In another example, the time for reaching a stable phase of gas flow after a ramping stage has commenced is monitored. When the time for reaching a particular stage begins to decline by a predetermined amount, an alarm may be generated.

Apparatus and methods for precompiling program sequences for wafer processing

A scheduler handles the various tasks to be performed on a wafer processing system as operations, with each operation having a predefined data structure. Operations that meet a set of requirements are added to an operation list. In the operation list, operations meeting another set of requirements are switched to the active state. Each active operation in the operation list is scheduled to run on the wafer processing system. Using structured operations to perform various tasks improves the extensibility and maintainability of the present scheduler. Further, the present scheduler can schedule several compatible operations at the same time by going through each operation in the operation list, and running those that are in the active state.

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Jaideep Jain