Semiconductor Manufacturing Process Control System 

Challenge

The customer has a complex process for manufacturing a gallium nitride (GaN) and aluminum nitride (AlN) substrates. The manufacturing process is delicate, involving many steps, precise timing, and accurate control of base materials.

Safety was also of great concern, since the process involves the use of poisonous gases. 

Solution

We created a flexible software system with LabVIEW that integrates a large number of transducers and controls using DeviceNet and other protocols. The system is built around a user-programmable scripting system. The users can build recipe scripts to control almost any process without changing LabVIEW code. 

(Image obscured at customer request)

The system features include:

• User-defined recipes for process control
• Fail-safe machine states
• User-definable fault-handling
• Interactive manual mode for system maintenance
• Recipe editor allows point and click programming
• Data is logged to a CSV file for customer evaluation in Excel
• 3-D GUI representative of the physical system

Technical Details

This system was created using National Instruments LabVIEW using the GOOP for object-oriented programming.