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SEMI International Standards
SEMI New Activity Report Form (SNARF)



Activity Number: 4557
SNARF for: PV-EIS Equipment Interface Specification Standards


Originating Global Technical Committee: Photovoltaic
Originating Technical Committee Region: Europe
Task Force in which work is to be carried out: Photovoltaic – Equipment Interface Specification (PV-EIS)


1. Rationale:
IT Equipment integration as basis of all high functionality shopfloor IT Systems

On today’s advanced photovoltaic shopfloors transition from line-integrated IT solution based on PLCs and industry PC to fully-featured MES solution is a must for every company to keep its competitive advantage. High volume production supported by high automation capability is only possible by establishing Industry usable standards in all IT areas..
Cost cutting and efficiency reasons bring in multiple equipments from different vendors which must interoperate in various conditions. This can only be established by adequate standards adapted to the needs of PV manufacturing. Standardization, especially for semiconductor manufacturing, has enabled a tight integration of equipments and control systems which supported the increase in productivity over the last decades.
With the building of more and more new PV factories the need for standardization is becoming urgent. Equipment Integration standards for PV provide the ability to reduce integration costs of these new factories dramatically.

Equipment integration is expensive, time consuming, and risky

Equipment integration has become one of the major cost drivers, both in initial implementation (ramp up) and maintenance phase. Photovoltaic manufacturer and prime contractors are spending a huge amount of money and time to enable access to process and product data as well as to manage the equipments itself. Equipment suppliers also spent a lot of effort in providing specific interfaces to their different customers instead of concentrating their resources on enhancing manufacturing processes. PV manufacturers, their prime contractors as well as equipment suppliers needs to be given tools and
standards to concentrate on applications and on modeling equipment behavior instead of implementing “low-level communication”.
Low level communication is not the only important topic of equipment integration, it is the basis for all areas e.g. job control, material tracking, etc.
To facilitate equipment integration, an abstracted object model of the equipment is required, reflecting the requirements of PV manufacturers. This encompasses a decomposition of the equipment behavior into services and a defined list of variants (sub services). “Process control” is one example of such a service, “continuous process control” is an example of a variant (sub service). Services and variants (sub services) require a set of parameters which needs to be described and named.

PV industry has specific needs on equipment integration

Established standards from SEMI and other organizations might not be directly applicable to PV.
One reason for this is the reduced complexity in PV manufacturing compared to regular semiconductor manufacturing. Using established SEMI Standards might result in high cost for integration as well as equipments itself due to the features provided by existing standards.
Only a subset of these standards does apply to PV manufacturing and would result in unwanted costs for the industry.
As a relatively new industry PV does not need to be backward compliant with older factories. This provides the industry with the opportunity to base on modern architecture and state of the art technologies. This can only be achieved by own standards for PV.
A review of existing standards from different industries and a adaption of best practices to PV will enable the industry to keep integration costs low.
Modularity will provide the possibility to build lightweight implementations as well as complex implementations to support all levels of shop floor automation.
This will help manufacturers to build factories using many levels of automation for thin film and silicon based factories.

The following objectives can be derived from the given arguments.

Objectives

• Standardization on equipment interfaces for use with (service-oriented) shopfloor software systems based on the technical and financial requirements of PV industry

• Not to reinvent the wheel by (re-) using existing standards (SEMI, Non-semi, Company-Specifc)

• Provision of design patterns and usage guidelines for integration equipments into a distributed (service-oriented) IT-environment

• Identification of equipment services

• Feedback gained experience to "semiconductor" standards

Rate the Estimated Effect on the Industry
2: Major effect on an industry sector - identify the relevant sector

Rate the Estimated Technical Difficulty of the Activity
III: Difficult - Limited expertise and resources exist and/or achieving consensus difficult

2. Scope:
a: Define the areas to be covered or addressed by this activity or document:
The focus of the proposed task force is the definition of the interface between the equipment and other components of the manufacturing system for the photovoltaic industry in a way that it will fulfill the following requirements:
High-level requirement:

• appropriate for various types of PV processes and technologies

• appropriate for different levels of automation and automation concepts

• provide high level abstractions (based on manufacturing semantics, not on bits and bytes) in order to minimize integration efforts

• appropriate for modern SW technologies and paradigms

Functional requirements:

• The interface has to cover all areas of services of modern manufacturing control systems such as:
• Equipment monitoring
• WIP tracking
• Data collection
• Operation
• Maintenance management
• Material identification
• Process and Job control
• Recipes

Non-functional requirements:

• open for easy integration in a variety of environments (platforms, programming languages)

• easily extendible for requirements not foreseeable today and for specific functions

• allow for reliable operation of the manufacturing environment

• allow tuning the trade-offs between performance and quality of service

• allow for similar layering for adapting a variety of proprietary communication protocols

• allow Plug and Play by using self description

The taskforce will define interfaces and services as well as sub services for the above described requirements. All Services as well as the parameters needed for the services have to be named and described in detail. For each service described before one ore more communication scenarios will be defined to visualize how the service will be called and interact with other services.
Bringing together expertise from a variety of PV equipment suppliers and users from wafering, cell and module manufacturing as well as thin film PV manufacturer, a comprehensive list of behavioral services and their sub services can be defined resulting in an invaluable repository for equipment modeling.
Design patterns and usage guidelines for embedding equipments into a distributed service-oriented environment should be given.

b: Expected result of activity
New Standard

3. Projected Timetable for Completion:
a: General Milestones
a. Activity Start: 09/07/2007b. 1st Draft by:
c. Preballot by: d. Technical Ballot by: 03/05/2007
e. Committee Approval By:09/07/2007

b: Activity Specific Milestones
a. Proof of Concept b. Acquisition of Resources:
c. Safety Checklist Completed



Safety Considerations:
The resulting document is expected NOT to be a Safety Guideline


Intellectual Property Considerations:
a. In complying with the standard or safety guideline to be developed, the use of patented technology or a copyrighted item(s) is NOT required
b. The body of the standard and any appendices or related information sections will NOT include copyrighted material

Comments, Special Circumstances: None.

Approval: Activity approved by Committee/GCS on September 7, 2007