One bedrock requirement within the semiconductor industry is the need for a comprehensive maintenance program to support reliable and predictable tool performance. While this is true, it is certainly not the case where “more is better,” but rather an effort to define the truly necessary actions and best-known methods in maintaining tools to optimize availability, productivity, and product quality. The ongoing development and integration of Smart Manufacturing solutions across the factory systems landscape is now playing a role toward these objectives in providing a foundation for defining, deploying, and managing optimized maintenance task workflows.
GLOBALFOUNDRIES is implementing a program to challenge the complexity and content of Preventative Maintenance tasks (among others) to identify real added value, and to otherwise eliminate unnecessary or complex functions. This effort has leveraged decades of subject matter expertise and experience, evidence, and extensive data for decision-making. The goals are to streamline work content, simplify workflows, minimize handovers, and otherwise provide clear task instruction and decision support. The FabRecover product from INFICON is the maintenance decision support system that has been employed to introduce and refine these methods over time at our Fab 9 facility in Burlington, VT.
The results of the program overall have seen significant benefit in several dimensions that will be shared during the presentation. Maintenance quality overall has been maintained or improved while requiring lower maintenance technician work content and PM durations. Deployment of FabRecover for online task execution support and management has led to less variability in work and robust results. Content management overall has been reduced, while at the same time improving execution with the application of rule sets and dynamic decisions, facilitation of tool- and context-specific guidance, and overall real-time workflow execution management. Its coupling with a full Digital Twin also holds promise for future end-to-end visibility for comprehensive KPI tracking and reporting, which in turn will further support data-driven continuous improvement and automated scheduling solutions.