AVS 52nd International Symposium
    Vacuum Technology Tuesday Sessions
       Session VT-TuP

Paper VT-TuP5
Active Algorithms for State-Variable Monitoring of Dry Vacuum Pumps

Tuesday, November 1, 2005, 4:00 pm, Room Exhibit Hall C&D

Session: Vacuum Technology Poster Session
Presenter: W.S. Cheung, Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science
Authors: W.S. Cheung, Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science
J.Y. Lim, Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science
C.U. Cheong, Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science
K.-H. Chung, Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science
Correspondent: Click to Email
Demands on capacity and reliability of dry vacuum pumps in modern semiconductor manufacturing processes have been constantly increasing. It is the reason that the costs for failed wafer batches and lost production times are higher and higher as the size of the production wafer is larger and larger. To tackle vacuum pump-related demands in the semiconductor production lines, Korean IC makers have recently put much efforts to establish the predictive maintenance and failure protection of vacuum pumps. For instance, Samsung has decided to buy no vacuum pump without the monitoring system for the pre-failure protection and predictive maintenance. This research team has surveyed what state variables are monitor in the Korean production lines and the current state-of-art of pump monitoring systems available from pump suppliers. This paper will introduce the surveyed results and will suggest what state variables a pump monitoring system should measure. Active ways of monitoring the change of selected state variables are proposed to assess the degradation of running pumps. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed methods, several field test results are demonstrated. Attempts of those field tests have allowed this research to see what limits current pump monitoring systems have. One of significant limits was the incompatibility to the SEMI equipment modeling and communication standards. The current monitoring systems were found to be too far from either SECS-II/GEM standards or the current e-Diagnostics guideline. Finally, this paper suggests a guideline for the vacuum pump manufacturers to meet for the integration of vacuum pumps into the computer-based management system.