Operating System: Windows NT, 2000, XP SEMI Standards Supported: E4, E5, E30, E37, E40, E42, E58, E84, E87, E90, E94, E95, E98, E99, E109, E116, E118
Hardware Devices Supported:
The Genmark Integration Framework and Technology (GIFT) development kit is a set of software components, tools and techniques used for rapid development of equipment automation applications. It offers off-the-shelf factory host-computer interface, which are compliant with all related SEMI standards. The product features advanced user interface, broad range of supported automation hardware and presets for many 300mm semiconductor factories.
The GIFT is highly customizable application utilizing technologies such as COM/DCOM, ActiveX, XML and XSLT. It lets you integrate your own process modules, embed application specific ActiveX controls for process monitoring or recipe editing, or configure tool specific wafer scheduling. All system functions and objects are easily available through COM interfaces.
The GIFT has unique features such as:
A new application design begins with specification of the hardware device configuration using the GIFT Builder. You can select from various models and specify an arbitrary set of load ports, robots, pre-aligners, carrier and wafer ID readers, E84 interfaces and mini-environment controllers. The custom process modules are defined along with their GEM specific alarms, events, variables and constants. The GEM Builder uses standard and custom databases to generate the program definitions, the run-time configuration data and the GEM documentation.
The next step is implementation of a COM interface between the GIFT Server and your process control software. Genmark Automation provides examples in VC, VB and Delphi to ease the integration process.
The GIFT Builder offers a visual user interface configuration, which lets you select the views required by the application. At this point you can specify any ActiveX control that needs to be integrated.
The final step is customization of the wafer-scheduling algorithm. The rules for the wafer transport between different equipment locations can be modified by using XSLT transformations.
The centerpiece of the system is the GIFT Server. It features highly customizable user interface and COM based application-programming interface. The communication with the factory host is facilitated by another component - GEM Engine. It manages all SECS transactions and implements most GEM requirements such as data tracing and event reporting. Device drivers implementing specific communication protocols support the communication with the various equipment modules.
The design of the GIFT server follows the concepts of SEMI E98 standard - Object Based Equipment Model. All hardware devices and the system are modeled as E98 objects. They represent the static structure of the equipment to be controlled. The carriers, the substrates and their locations, as well as the process and control jobs are considered dynamic objects. All object attributes, methods and the related data structures are exposed to the client application through dedicated COM interfaces.
The Job Executor directs the material transport inside the equipment with the recipes execution by each process module. The GIFT implementation of a job executor consists of material Scheduler and Schedule Executor. The Job definitions are stored in XML format. They are translated into a material schedule by the Scheduler using a set of rules described in an XSLT file. You can configure the job execution by modifying the XSLT transformations. The resulting schedule is a list of commands interpreted by the Schedule Executor. The commands include requests to the material handler as well as requests to the process modules. [The described mechanism offers high flexibility combined with simplicity of the implementation.] The GIFT Server comes with a number of predefined schedule rules that cover the majority of the applications without rules changes.
GIFT Server can be used as a standalone application. It has full-featured graphical user interface designed in compliance with the SEMI E95 guidelines. The GUI components include Job Editor and Monitor, Material Tracking Interface, User Account Management, Maintenance screen for each equipment module, Alarm handler and many others. You can configure the presence and the appearance of specific views using the GIFT Builder.
If you need to modify the GUI capabilities, then you can take advantage of a special view designed as an ActiveX container. It allows you to embed your own customized or commercial ActiveX controls in the
GIFT framework. This way the functionality of the application can be easily extended while its common look and feel is preserved.
Another way of utilizing the GIFT Server GUI is by controlling it through a dedicated COM interface. You can program a client application that controls the size, the focus and the visual attributes of the GIFT Views. In this case, the GIFT Server may be regarded as a slave component that provides a specific user interface for the material handling subsystem.
The GIFT Server exports a set of interfaces dedicated to the integration of custom process modules. It simplifies the job of the software engineers by offering a set of COM events that need to be sunk. They are divided in groups related to specific functional requirements:
GEM Support (Remote Commands, Data Transfer and Collection Events) Comprehensive set of source code examples in VC, VB and Delphi simplifies the implementation process.
The application compliance with most SEMI standards is qualified using the CCS Technology's Envoy and its test plans. The built-in simulation mode allows the execution of regression tests without the need of a real hardware.
In addition to the factory host communication standards, the GIFT comes with more than 400 test plans intended to verify all aspects of the system operation. The execution of the tests can be fully automatic or manual. You can start a single test or a test group using dedicated test-case browser. The test results including the discovered problems are saved in a test report for further analysis.
