A SYSTEM FOR SEMICONDUCTOR PROCESS SPECIFICATION

A system for the capture and management of semiconductor fabrication p rocess information has been implemented. Equipment recipes, process st eps, and process flows contain a great deal of information, and many d ifferent kinds of users generate or consume that information, includin g unit process developers, facility operators, technicians, and manage rs, as well as process flow and device developers. In an active integr ated circuit fabrication facility, furthermore, a large number of peop le must interact with process specifications simultaneously. These cha llenges have been met in the SPEC implementation in three ways. First, the SPEC data model decomposes process specifications into equipment, step, process, and flow hierarchies. Second, mechanisms within an int eractive graphical user interface provide a high degree of user contro l over the expression and organization of process information. Users c ontrol the organization of objects within each layered hierarchy, and control the information in terms of collection, propagation to other l ayers, and the appearance of the data within specification ''folders'' via a ''what you see is what you get'' (WYSIWYG) folder builder. Fina lly, implementation on a concurrent object-oriented database enables s imultaneous use of the SPEC system by many users. The SPEC system has been in use since early 1992, and effectively supports over 200 users, typically with 5-10 of these using the system at any instant in time to define, review, or update process steps and flows, and to automatic ally generate travelers for process flows.