Integrated Product and Process Control for Sustainable Semiconductor Manufacturing

Semiconductor fabrication is a manufacturing sequence with hundreds of sophisticated unit operations and it is always challenged by strategy development for ensuring the yield of defect-free products. In this paper, an advanced control strategy through integrating product and process control is established. The proposed multiscale scheme contains three layers for coordinated equipment control, process control and product quality control. In the upper layer, online control performance assessment is applied to reduce the quality variation and maximize the overall product performance (OPP). It serves as supervisory control to update the recipe of the process controller in the middle layer. The process controller is designed as an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) run-to-run controller to reject disturbances, such as process shift, drift and tool worn out, that are exerted to the operation. The equipment in the process is individually controlled to maintain its optimal operational status and maximize the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), based on the set point given by the process controller. The efficacy of the proposed integrated control scheme is demonstrated through case studies, where both the OPP (for product) and the OEE (for equipment) are enhanced.