For more than 60 years, Polar Semiconductor has been manufacturing high-performance sensor, power, and high-voltage computer chips for the automotive, consumer, and industrial markets.
Situated alongside the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge in Bloomington, MN, Polar’s state-of-the-art research and 200mm manufacturing facility produces half a billion semiconductors each year. As the only U.S. majority owned foundry for power semiconductors, Polar is a very strategic part of the efforts for U.S. semiconductor onshoring and supporting critical aerospace and defense programs.
Poised for growth
To bolster domestic production, Polar announced an ambitious expansion and modernization plan that, once complete, will see the company transition to a merchant foundry, doubling its capacity while implementing modern automation and AI-powered capabilities throughout its operations.
A critical aspect of this modernization is upgrading the fab’s aging software stack, including the existing station controllers that are deployed throughout the factory.
Also known as equipment interfaces, station controllers provide SECS/GEM-compliant communications between manufacturing equipment and other factory systems to enable a variety of key operational functions including tool integration, factory automation, and data collection.
A modern solution
“Our legacy station controllers had reached their operational limit,” says Chet Borg, Polar’s Director of Information Technology, “they ran outdated and unsupported operating systems, limited our data collection and automation capabilities, and left us vulnerable to cyberattacks.”
To help replace the station controllers with a modern solution, Polar engaged PEER Group, a long-time partner going back to 2018. “We required a station controller platform that employs modern operating systems, new technologies and capabilities, and is supported and regularly updated to improve our cybersecurity,” says Borg, while adding: “PEER Group’s PEER Factory Station Controller (PFSC) met these requirements, making it the ideal solution for us.”
Amy Pattenden, a Senior Software Developer at PEER Group and veteran member of the Factory Services team, collaborated with Polar developers and engineers to develop a PFSC solution tailored to their specific needs.
This includes the option to run the solution headless, the flexibility to operate seamlessly with both legacy and future IT infrastructure, and the ability to rapidly integrate a wide variety of tools with minimal operational downtime. “Amy is extremely helpful and knowledgeable, and her responses are immediate and accurate,” says Borg, speaking about the experience designing and developing Polar’s PFSC solution with Pattenden and the rest of the Factory Services team.
With the solution design and development complete, Borg and his team of developers and engineers used PFSC to create the individual station controllers needed for each tool being integrated into the factory operations.
Rapid tool integration
“As part of the expansion and doubling of capacity, we are bringing hundreds of new tools into the manufacturing environment,” says Borg. The list of tools comprises a 50/50 mix of first-in-fab and known equipment and includes 75 unique tool types. Developing station controllers and integrating this amount and variety of tools while keeping on schedule is a monumental task.
“Before PFSC, building equipment interfaces for each tool was a slow and tedious process,” says Borg. “Our engineers were required to read the equipment GEM manuals and manually input all the required data needed to develop the station controllers.”
Polar leveraged PFSC’s PEER Data Transformer (PDT), a built-in utility that can ingest a supplier’s SECS/GEM manual and automatically transform the information into a digital model of the equipment. This provides the building blocks developers use to create a station controller application to both run the equipment and collect data from it. Additional time savings came from using Composer, a low-code, drag-and-drop graphical design tool that includes a library of common pre-built components to further reduce the complexity of equipment interface development.
With PFSC, Borg and his team were able to reduce system integration time by an impressive 30 per cent compared to the manual process, allowing them to keep up with the delivery of new tools to the factory while limiting any major impacts to production.
PEER Group has been very attentive to our current and future needs. They treat Polar as a true partner.
Chet Borg, Director of Information Technology, Polar Semiconductor
A foundation for the future
As Polar continues its ambitious transformation, the successful deployment of PFSC lays the groundwork for scalable growth, advanced automation, and seamless integration of future technologies. The collaboration between Polar and PEER Group has not only modernized critical infrastructure but also fostered a partnership built on responsiveness and shared vision. “PEER Group has been very attentive to our current and future needs,” shares Borg. “They treat Polar as a true partner.”
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