Supervisor Control Design for Safe Coordination of Multicluster and Multiproduct Wafer Manufacturing Processes

Motivated by the expansion of the modern wafer semiconductor industry, where the manufacturing process consists of multiple cluster tools, including robots and process modules, a coordination tool is developed based on supervisory control theory. The tool is parametric with respect to the number of cluster tools, the number of process modules of each cluster tool, and the number of product types, treated simultaneously in the cluster tools. In the present paper, a fully parametric model of semiconductor manufacturing processes will be developed, using the models of the robots and the models of the process modules. The desired operational specifications for the coordination of the subsystems of the process will be developed. The development of the supervisor design, realizing these specifications, will be initiated by the translation of the specifications to appropriate sets of regular languages. Next, each regular language will be realized by a respective supervisor automaton, expressed in parametric form. The supervisor design will be completed by the determination of the automaton of the total controlled process and the examination of its satisfactory performance, by proving the controllability of the desired languages and the nonblocking property of the total controlled process.