Abstract
In recent years, the semiconductor manufacturing industry has seen a diversification of demand and the importance of high mix low volume production has increased. In the manufacture of semiconductors using process etching equipment, a device called a linear cluster tool is used, in which process modules that process one by one wafer are linearly connected by multiple links. In a production system such as a linear cluster tool, it is required to avoid phenomena such as deadlocks and collisions caused by resource constraints such as machines, parallel operations, and so on. However, it is difficult for control methods that assume mass production of a small variety of products to cope with high mix low volume production in which the process is frequently changed. In particular, the software that controls the equipment has become increasingly complex and large in scale to address this challenge, and this has also caused a problem of reduced maintainability. The purpose of this study is to propose an efficient control method design by integrating Petri net model and object oriented design method to solve these problems and to propose a method to develop highly reliable equipment control software.
