In the well-established manufacturing processes of the semiconductor industry, robots and chemical vapor deposition (CVD)/ physical vapor deposition (PVD) machines can be commonly seen. Robots quickly move wafers from different production lines to increase the production yield and CVD/PVD machines are used to form a thin film on wafers. To capture data from these machines, the industry needs advanced data acquisition and analysis capabilities to boost continuous machine operation and production yields.

A leading semiconductor company in Taiwan adopted Advantech's ADAM-6017 Ethernet I/O, ADAM-6317 OPC UA Ethernet I/O to avoid malware attack for enhanced security, and EKI-2728 switch for robots and CVD/PVD machine data acquisition and analysis, which helps improve semiconductor management, machine efficiency, and production stability.

Wafer surface damage and scratch defects need to be located during the chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) process to ensure wafer surface purity and planarity.

Advantech’s machine vision edge solution was installed as the CMP system which included CMP machinery, robotic handling system, a vision inspection system, and uplink data for the IT database. 

Our machine vision inspection system covered industrial-grade image sensors, high-level computing industrial PC IPC-240, frame grabber card PCIE-1674E-AE, high speed industrial cameras, and the VisionNavi application software, which users can easily deploy for vision inspection applications without any programming skills.

Wafer cleaning is a crucial part of the semiconductor manufacturing process. Wafers are cleaned before and after each process throughout the entire IC production line and takes up approximately 1/3 of the whole production time.

Advantech and our system integrator (SI) proposed using a machine vision solution to replace the mechanical positioning equipment in the wafer cleaning process. The project integrated Advantech’s IPC-7120, AIMB-788, and PCIE-1674 with built-in VisionNavi and one Advantech QCAM mega pixel PoE industrial camera on an intermediate station to help with position correction. An AIIS-3411P compact vision system computer is used on the place station with VisionNavi and three QCAMs to judge the center position and any warpage.

The results showed that each wafer can now be accurately re-centered in milliseconds rather than seconds—without wafer damage, which further improved the leading IC manufacturer’s production yield rates and efficiency.

Wafer testing is a crucial process during semiconductor device fabrication, performed by wafer probing equipment that precisely measures each wafer’s electrical characteristics to identify defects.

For wafer testing applications, Advantech provides the iDAQ modular system with DAQNavi software development kit. The iDAQ-751 high-density digital I/O module controls up to 48 peripheral switches/devices at a time and satisfies precise positioning requirements. The iDAQ-821 DAQ module offers 8-ch analog outputs of test signals for testing wafers, and the iDAQ-841 can measure wafer electrical characteristics with 1 MS/s sampling rates to identify any potential wafer defects.



Industrial PCs and connectivity devices, such as EKI series PoE injectors and managed switches can further acquire data to send back to the control room for wafer quality monitoring.