SEMI E30: Specification for the Generic Model for Communications and Control of Manufacturing Equipment (GEM)
This is the golden standard for host-to-equipment communication, describing many of the basic capabilities that fabs expect tools to support:
- Establishing communications correctly with the factory host.
- Determining who has control of the tool: the remote host or local operator.
- Reporting of sensor data, state information, and processing results from the tool through Status Variables or Data Variables.
- Raising Events to report on relevant equipment activities and Alarms to notify the host when an error scenario occurs.
- Allowing the host to change equipment functionality by setting Equipment Constants.
- Responding to Remote Commands sent by the host, for process control and material movement.
- Host management of the library of Process Programs (recipes) on the equipment.
Other capabilities may be required by the fab as well, such as clock (time) management, a terminal view for local operators to send messages to host personnel, reporting on material movement, spooling SECS-II messages while communications are down, and monitoring trace data reported by the equipment. While subsequent standards describe more sophisticated material handling and production control scenarios, they all rely upon the core capabilities described in SEMI E30, particularly alarm, event, and data publication.
A number of our products support SEMI E30.