Practical issues in the deployment of a run-to-run control system in a semiconductor manufacturing facility

ProcessWORKS, a factory-level run-to-run control architecture, originally developed at Texas Instruments and now a product of Adventa Control Technologies, can treat complex control problems in an automated, predictable, and repeatable fashion. ProcessWORKS is compatible with different techniques for data acquisition and analysis, model adjustment and feedback, and model optimization. ProcessWORKS is also designed to deal with practical implementation issues in the fab. In this talk we will review the benefits of ProcessWORKS run-to-run control. We will discuss some practical problems in the deployment of run-to-run control in the fab, and we will show how ProcessWORKS deals with these issues. Examples from the deployment of ProcessWORKS at Texas Instruments on state of the art semiconductor technologies will be given.