Crossing Automation - Technology Highlights

Crossing Automation is at the leading-edge of automation technology development for semiconductor, MEMS and green technology-related manufacturing; as part of our commitment to driving the most effective, cost-efficient automation systems, our engineering department consistently strives to identify new approaches to automation technology and unique and innovative ways to implement existing and off-the-shelf components to increase customers' ROI and decrease time to market.


Check back regularly to see the latest developments at Crossing Automation and what the company is doing to further increase our customers' performance, and ultimately, profitability.



Design for Modularity


The concept of modularity in software has come a long way since the pioneering work in 1970s; in mechanical design, modularity is often an incidental outcome. Similar to modularity in software design, the concept must be embedded during the early phases of the system architecture design. Mechanical functionality must be redistributed such that the failure points are isolated to individual modules, and this concept is at the core of Crossing Automation's approach to wafer-level automation. Modular systems allow module replacement without impacting overall system performance, facilitate preventive maintenance planning, reduce the time to repair and improve system availability and uptime.

Design Rules of Modular Automation Systems

The primary objective of modular design is to configure a complex system as a set of independent and distinct sub sets or modules. Modular designs create options that are not available for non-modular or interdependent systems. One option is the ability to re-configure a system for varying customer needs. Functional partitioning allows modular designs to segregate complexity into smaller and more manageable chunks; this reduces the uncertainty in the overall system performance.

We have found the following rules to be helpful in developing modular designs:


Module characterization to compensate for manufacturing variability High performance equipment, such as wafer automation systems are sensitive to variability introduced by manufacturing and assembly processes. Robotic mechanisms and variation in the end-use of the equipment, as examples, require an understanding of the optimal values of the system control parameters, and modular design permits each module to be characterized independently.

Data acquisition and analysis to enhance predictive maintenance implementations

Isolating failure points and determining the optimal set of control parameters provides the ability to measure drift in performance to the module level. Since measurement points are isolated and non-interacting, it is possible to pin-point deviations from normal performance and correlate the deviations to actual hardware to eliminate guesswork. The ease of field replacement, combined with real-time diagnosis, allows for preventive maintenance and results in high overall equipment utilization.

Technical Papers

Real-Time Frequency Response: Identification of Resonances Leads to Improvements in Mechanical Design

By: Ghulam Mustafa and
Ken Krzeczowski

Summary:

A key aspect of the development of robotic applications and mechanisms involves obtaining the frequency response of the closed-loop system. This is accomplished by either the swept sine wave method, or more typically, by injecting bandlimited Gaussian white noise into the control system. The frequency response is usually shown in a Bode Plot drawn by plotting the magnitude of the Fourier Transform versus the frequency of the collected response data.


In most designs, the frequency response curves are obtained by taking the robot off-line to a test bench and connecting the controller to an external noise source as input and recording the position data from the encoder. The Bode Plot is computed after the test is completed and can take several iterations to get a valid frequency response curve with acceptable coherence.


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Behind the Technology

Larry Wise

Larry Wise

VP of Engineering

Automation Technology As I See It


Like many of my associates at Crossing Automation, I've been a customer for wafer automation in my career, spanning more than 25 years. I've had the opportunity to develop platforms and products for lithography, etch, and e-beam tools used in fabs world-wide. During that time, I experienced many frustrations that are well-known to equipment designers: trying to integrate bare component-level elements or facing prohibitively-expensive integrated systems that didn't meet my needs, much less at a usable price-point. In many cases, we integrated components that were very difficult and expensive to service, an outcome of designs that paid minimal attention to the DFX's that equipment designers were increasingly being measured against by the chipmakers. Finally, the software/firmware provided often required extensive software development to interface and control, was not always reliable, and was minimally controlled to ensure stability over time.


Crossing Automation is developing the products and modules that I believe directly address these concerns that many of us personally experienced.


Our designs revolve around the following principles:


I sincerely believe Crossing Automation's products will demonstrate the power of systems-oriented, rather than component-oriented design, done with modularity, simplicity, and reuse as central attributes.