Setting Goals and Exceeding Expectations in 2021
In a June 2020 article titled "Preparing Your Business For Excellence During Crisis" published by Innowave, we discussed combining advanced technologies with a pragmatic change in operational paradigm to achieve business continuity and excellence in the midst of a global crisis.
Today, let us examine how making these important decisions have definitely improved the performance of the semiconductor industry.
Setting the Agenda
As businesses look to 2021 and beyond, one of the key lessons of 2020 is that efforts into automation should not be narrowly defined as "pandemic response". Strategic goals like streamlining operational processes and labour dependency reduction must ultimately drive this innovation. As such, industry leaders find themselves making tough choices with regards to various structural reforms and infrastructure reinvestment.
One thing is certain: the hyper-accelerated drive towards Industry 4.0 is here to stay, and it is paramount that companies stay ahead of the curve in this fast-changing landscape.
Putting Ideas to Work
First and foremost in this effort is making a concerted effort to digitize. Companies are awash with analog data - from equipment, people, processes. By digitizing and analyzing this data, we improve the efficiency, productivity, and access by different users and stakeholders. The shift to paperless real-time monitoring of production also removes the need for manual monitoring and stacks of on-paper data.
Major technological advancements we have made in optics systems and computer vision have significantly reduced cost and increased capability of defect detection, recognition and classification. Detection of minute crack lines, even with complicated backgrounds, before breakage also offer an early signal of the health of the line.
Figure 1: Detailed Tool Health Information Board
By combining our AI algorithm and computer vision techniques, with state-of-the-art automation with a UPH > 160, and easy-to-use HMI for operators, we have achieved a huge reduction of engineers and operators' time. This greatly reduces the need for data collation, analysis, judgement by engineers, and improving detection rate and accuracy at the same time. The smart functions also make it possible for line people and operators to take fast action after the training the use of smart functions.
True to our central strategy of designing end-to-end solutions, we deployed our proprietary platform that provides a whole suite of features that build on the data obtained from our crack detection tool. These include:
Real-time monitoring of crack and breakage rate in the entire production line
Trend of overall crack and breakage rate in any defined time frame, in conjunction with those rates observed in different layers
Occurrences of patterns of crack lines across production machines throughout a specified time window
Automatically analyze common machines for specific defects signature, or suspected equipment with certain failure patterns or defects signature
Tool health surveillance system that generates circumstantial report
Meeting Goals
To achieve the objectives set by our customers, a series of active and intimate collaborations between us and various business stakeholders are necessary. This allows us to avoid potential pitfalls, explore deeper improvements, and fully understand the problems and challenges faced by businesses.
Figure 3: Broken Wafer Quarterly Rate
This successful and proven model of collaboration has resulted in significant improvements, including over 65% reduction in scrappage and a corresponding increase in line yield within just a few months, resulting in multi-million dollars saving. With proper training and management, we are confident that our customers will continue to improve their yield without our active intervention.
"Predictive technology was successfully incorporated in Innowave's Smart Camera System to to detect sources for crack/broken wafers. This truly marks the spirit of Industry 4.0!"
Alan Yek, Director of Yield at Skyworks Solutions, Singapore
An Eye on 2021
2020 was a challenging year. While we are grateful that it has also been a fruitful year, we have only just begun, with this article illustrating just one of our several successful stories. Innowave Tech will continue to advance our technological edge, explore the benefits of digitization and automation, and develop other intelligent solutions for the semiconductor world.
Written by:
Xu Jin Song
Managing Director at Innowave Tech