By David Lammers

The ISMI Manufacturing Week is no longer, being replaced with a members-only event, Sematech said. That move has prompted another manufacturing-related gathering, the Advanced Process Control (APC) conference, to set up a separate event, with a meeting planned for September in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The annual ISMI event had attracted more than 500 participants to Austin each fall, with sessions on environment, safety, and health, refurbished equipment, the 450mm wafer transition, and others, as well as keynote speakers drawn from the top semiconductor and equipment vendors. A Sematech spokesman said the planned members-only event will focus on “providing increased value to ISMI’s membership by bringing them together with the supplier community to proliferate innovations in semiconductor operations.”

The APC Conference had co-located with ISMI Manufacturing Week for the past two years, with mixed results, said John Pace, president of the Integrated Measurement Association (IMA), which will host the APC Conference XXIV. After more than 18 years of holding separate meetings, the APC conference tried to co-locate with the much larger ISMI Manufacturing Week, a move “that was not popular with our members, who wanted to have a separate event.”

Organizers issued a call for papers for the upcoming APC conference during a SEMI-organized conference going on this week in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., the Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference. Abstracts can be submitted on-line, or if that is not possible, by email to APCconference@gmail.com.

Brad Van Eck, chairman of the APC conference, said the APC meetings in the United States normally attracted more than 200 control experts since 1992, peaking at 500 in the late 1990s. “APC is a very focused event. People in the advanced process control community bring new ideas to APC first,” he said. Fault detection and classification (FDC), run-to-run control, and predictive techniques such as virtual metrology and predictive maintenance, are expected to be on the agenda at the Ann Arbor event, planned for Sept. 10-12.

Interestingly, APC has thrived overseas. A European event, APCM, has attracted sponsors and participants, and an Asian-focused conference that alternates between Japan and Taiwan also has continued.

James Moyne, a professor at the University of Michigan who also works for Applied Materials, said the APC event will be held at a conference hall at the university. The organizers are soliciting papers beyond the semiconductor space, soliciting papers from control engineers working in solar, MEMS, LEDs, and related areas. Van Eck said people working at manufacturers, equipment suppliers, software solution providers, and sensor and metrology suppliers, are expected to  submit abstracts.  Topics include:

•        Run-to-run, wafer-to-wafer, real-time control; process modeling and model-based control

•        Fault detection and classification (FDC); fault prediction (FP)

•        Factory-wide and enterprise-wide applications and deployment

•        Integrated metrology and virtual metrology

•        Predictive technologies such as predictive maintenance, predictive scheduling and predictive yields

•        APC integration with technologies such as yield/maintenance management, adaptive scheduling and DFM

•        Sensor development, implementation and integration

•        Sensor/actuator bus and intelligent sensors

•        Real-time data collection and data management

•        Control architecture requirements

•        Applications (Etch, Litho, CVD, PVD, Implant)

•        Future APC needs and requirements

•        Data Mining

•        Airborne Molecular Contamination (AMC)

•        Benefits and justification (ROI, CoO, OEE)

•       Standards (process control systems, sensorbus, data quality, integrated metrology, EDA, time synch, Idle Mode, etc)

•        Tool productivity data collection/analysis

•        E-diagnostics, E-manufacturing, and EEC

•        APC in the next generation factory (NGF)

•        APC and APC-related advancements in solar devices, flat panels, LEDs and MEMs

•        APC applications to back-end semiconductor manufacturing

•        Remote/wireless sensors and networks applied to APC

•        APC and green technologies, such as “pump idle mode”

Tags: APC Conference, ISMI, Sematech, SEMI

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