Semiconductor
Cleanroom-compatible automation, facilities monitoring and tool data collection.
- Scope
- Ground to Cloud
- Approach
- Retrofit first
- Base
- Bangalore, India
The brief
What this sector asks of a control system
Semiconductor environments are unforgiving about contamination, tool uptime and data. We work on the automation and facilities layer around the process tools — material handling, environmental and utility monitoring, and getting tool data into a form the fab's own systems can use.
Every engagement starts the same way: we walk the floor, read the existing drawings, and write down what is actually installed before anyone proposes a platform. The sector decides the priorities — the plant decides the design.
Constraints we engineer around
What we bring
Disciplines we lead with in semiconductor
The same engineering team carries the work from the panel to the dashboard, so nothing is lost at a handover between vendors.
In detail
What shapes the work here
The constraints that decide how a system for this sector gets engineered.
Everything is a contamination decision
Component selection, cable specification, panel placement and even maintenance access are constrained by cleanroom class before they are constrained by function.
That has to shape the design from the first drawing. Retrofitting cleanroom compatibility onto equipment specified conventionally usually means buying it twice.
Facilities faults become process faults
Ultrapure water, process gases, vacuum, temperature and humidity are process inputs, and an excursion in any of them can quietly cost a batch worth more than the monitoring system.
Continuous monitoring with alarming that reaches somebody, plus a record that can be correlated against process events afterwards, is the minimum useful specification.
Tool data into the fab's systems
Process tools generate substantial data behind vendor interfaces. Getting it into the fab's own analysis and scheduling systems, in a consistent form, is usually more valuable than adding new sensing.
We work at that integration layer rather than attempting to reimplement tool control, which belongs with the tool vendor.
Typical scope
What we are brought in to do
- Cleanroom-compatible control panel and equipment design
- Facilities monitoring for gases, UPW, vacuum and HVAC
- Environmental excursion alarming and correlation records
- Tool data collection and normalisation for fab systems
- Material handling and interlocking around process tools
Engineering constraints
- Cleanroom
- Class drives selection, not function
- Facilities
- Treated as process inputs
- Tools
- Integrated, not reimplemented
Common questions
- Do you work inside the process tools themselves?
- No. Tool control belongs with the tool vendor. We work on the automation, facilities and data layers around them, which is where sites usually have the gap.
- Can you meet our cleanroom class requirements?
- We design to the class you specify, and we would rather have that constraint at the concept stage than at installation, where it becomes expensive.
- Can facilities excursions be correlated to yield?
- Only if both sides share a reliable clock and sufficient retention. We design for that explicitly, because the correlation is the entire point of the record.
Elsewhere
