Brooks-PRI automation helps
Samsung keep operations flowing

While Samsung Electronics’ wafer fab facility in Austin, Texas, is a highly complex manufacturing operation, Allison Keegan has a very simple way to describe it.

“I’ve always likened this factory to a money faucet,” said Keegan, who serves as master system administrator at the plant that produces 8-inch wafers for various electronic applications.

“If you stop the flow of chips, you stop the flow of money, and there’s no way to catch up because you’re already running the operation as fast as you can," he said. “If you lose time in this fab because a tool is down, you’re losing wafers, and any amount of wafer loss takes a lot of money away from the plant’s bottom line.”

Clearly, tool or machine downtime is anathema in any manufacturing operation, but as Keegan emphasizes, the financial ramifications in a wafer fab operation are especially severe. What’s more, if the Samsung facility experiences downtime on even one tool that every wafer in the operation has to go through, it has effectively, in Keegan’s words, “turned off the money faucet.”

The need to ensure proper tool operation and maintenance is critical at Samsung, which employs several hundred sophisticated tools in its operation. One example of this technological sophistication is in the area of photolithography, where employees actually shoot a picture on the wafer, put the circuit board on the wafer at a microscopic level, etch the wafers, then go in and microscopically connect the circuits.

Technology like this does not come cheap. In fact, with each of these tools representing a multimillion-dollar investment, Samsung’s total capital expenditure in tools approaches $1 billion. Few companies can afford this kind of investment, but Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. is one of the few. The company employs approximately 64,000 people in 89 offices in 47 countries and is the world’s largest producer of memory chips, smart card chips, display driver ICs, TFT-LCDs, CDMA mobile phones, monitors and VCRs.

The need to protect its financial investment in these tools goes hand-in-hand with the need to keep quality product flowing out of the company – meeting both requirements is what keeps the “money faucet” open. Consequently, Samsung turned to Brooks–PRI Automation Inc., which delivers total automation for semiconductor manufacturing. A publicly traded company based in Chelmsford, Mass., Brooks–PRI is an established market leader in hardware and software automation.

Brooks-PRI helped Samsung install and implement Brooks–PRI’s Xsite Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) product, an integrated software package that provides a means of controlling all aspects of equipment maintenance activity – specifically for semiconductor manufacturers – from breakdown analysis and work order control to condition monitoring and preventive maintenance scheduling. Xsite is based on an open, object-oriented architecture that gives users the ability to choose from a number of different factory applications and databases.

“We were looking for a very strong Preventive Maintenance (PM) manager,” Keegan said. “Based on Brooks–PRI’s demonstration of the product and our specifications, we were convinced that Xsite was the perfect tool for managing the PM function and that it could also play a key role in our overall equipment maintenance.”

According to Keegan, Xsite has provided numerous benefits, not the least of which has been the creation of an almost paperless operation.

“The biggest benefit is that we’ve been able to automate our Preventive Maintenance, which had previously been a manual operation,” said Keegan. “Prior to implementing Xsite, we were relying largely on a huge volume of paperwork, including Excel spreadsheets. Xsite has allowed us to perform PMs on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and semi-annual basis, while also linking them together and attaching customized checklists to them.

“Plus, the paperless aspect allows us to maintain extensive equipment documentation online, which not only makes it easier to access than paper, but also eliminates repeated departures and re-entry into our production area. The time savings in tool maintenance and repair is tremendous."

Xsite also provides a PM trigger that allows an operator to automatically idle a piece of equipment when critical PM checks still need to be performed. The result: production waste is reduced, and machine consistency and yield are optimized.

One of the problems Xsite alleviated for Samsung was the occurrence of PM checks being skipped and tools going down because the PM checks weren’t always performed in a timely manner.

Some of these PM checks must be performed on an hourly basis; if they are not, the financial ramifications can be dramatic. By employing Xsite, employees no longer have to lean on unreliable and largely ineffective methods – emails, postings, etc. – to be reminded of PMs.

“We’ve significantly decreased the human error factor in our PM checks,” Keegan said.

One of the primary factors leading to Samsung’s choice of Xsite was its ability to interface to the Manufacturing Execution System (MES) that physically controls the actual movement of the wafers through the production facility. The MES system is FACTORYworks, another Brooks-PRI product, which provides an interface with Xsite. When FACTORYworks tracked the state of the tools in the fab, Samsung wanted to ensure that the information was communicated to Xsite. Xsite reflects the tool status (up, down, PM) controlled by the FACTORYworks MES System.

Xsite provides a comprehensive set of reports, which Samsung has augmented with a number of custom reports, allowing the company to track overall tool performance and PM metrics more closely and accurately than ever before.

“You can’t put a price on the automated reporting and analysis that we’ve been able to produce. Before, you would know how long a machine would be down but you wouldn’t know why,” Keegan explained. “And even if you could figure out why, the information to verify your diagnosis wouldn’t be available until it appeared on a spreadsheet four months down the road.

“With the reports we get from Xsite, we can be more proactive in determining and analyzing trends, and do it in a very abbreviated timeframe.”

Using the real-time status board, Samsung employees can bring up a specific division such as photo, diffusion or CVD and display the status of all the tools located there. Further, employees can color-code the tools to indicate whether they are up or down, or running products. Keegan says that some employees etch their monitors with pictures of their tools because Xsite never leaves their screen. When a tool goes down, they see it 15 seconds later and they’re on the phone finding a repair solution. 

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