RTSPC - A SOFTWARE UTILITY FOR REAL-TIME SPC AND TOOL DATA-ANALYSIS

Competition in the semiconductor industry is forcing manufacturers to continuously improve the capability of their equipment. The analysis o f real-time sensor data from semiconductor manufacturing equipment pre sents the opportunity to reduce the cost of ownership of the equipment . Previous work by the authors showed that time series filtering in co mbination with multivariate analysis techniques can be utilized to per form statistical process control, and thereby generate real-time alarm s in the case of equipment malfunction. A more robust version of this fault detection algorithm is presented. The algorithm is implemented t hrough RTSPC, a software utility which collects real-time sensor data from the equipment and generates realtime alarms. Examples of alarm ge neration using RTSPC on a plasma etcher are presented.