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Mechanically Advanced Planarization System
Location: Japan
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Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP) has been widely used over the last few years for the planarization of DRAM's as well as micro-processors and ASIC's. Furthermore, as device dimensions continue to fall to 0.25 micron levels or even less, and as many layers of material have to be handled in advanced circuit processing, planarization by CMP has shifted from an optional processing method to a critical technology.
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 Pre- PPC application
Since the system's control center was equipped with merely display functions and had no PC based CPU, it could not actually control all the devices. An operator had to manipulate every device - not the central administration. A separate administrator was required to collect data for operation.
Post- PPC application
The PPC-120's high performance has expanded possibilities for control of the various devices by offering a central control platform. Now, the operator uses the PPC-120 to monitor system conditions and to administrate. The touch screen has enabled the operator to remote control each device. This improvement has made factory administration much more efficient and has saved on costs.
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System block diagram
System structure (software): OS/ Windows NT 4.0
System structure (hardware): PCL-743B Dual port RS-422/485 interface card
Problems and solution
The CMP system required expanded serial communication ports with PCL-743B interface cards. The system was using four COM ports for RS-232 x 3 and RS-422 x 1. The problem was that no IRQ (Interrupt Request) was left for the expansion of COM ports. By utilizing ELO touch panels, pointing devices (mouse) have become redundant and an extra COM port has become available for expansion.
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Advantech's PPC-120 satisfies customer demands for compact-design, low-cost, and high-performance.
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The customer has already applied the PPC-120 to their system. However, since the CMP system actually requires a much more compact Panel-PC (like the PPC-102), the customer suggested us to further improve the PPC-102 by expanding the number of slots inside.
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