Pain Points

Most of the equipments in photo area are so precise that are easily damaged while suffering earthquakes. The most effective way to mitigate the damage of equipment from an earthquake is to emergently stop the equipment in its safe position in time. However, to cost-effectively and precisely identify an earthquake without the interference from the seismic vibration signals is a challenge.

Requirement

Semiconductor fabs want to deploy a cost-effective seismic vibration monitoring system in the photo area to precisely detect earthquakes and stop the equipments in time.

Real Engagement

It is difficult to identify earthquake from any seismic vibration signals. However, contrary to an earthquake, the seismic vibrations usually randomly happen at different locations and times. Deploying multiple seismographs at different locations to detect simultaneous vibration signals is one way, which is very expensive. In this case, we replaced the seismographs with the triaxial, seismic, low frequency response accelerometers and a DynaMon monitoring system. This approach reduced the system cost without sacrificing the precision.

In this case, four dispersed locations were chosen to deploy seismic accelerometers. These accelerometers were connected to a 16-channels DynaMon analyzer through cables of tens meters.

Referring to the specification announced by CWB, a four-level alarm threshold of the magnitude is pre-configured in the DynaMon analyzer. The alarm of each level correlates to different combinations of actions like broadcasting, sending notifying email and text message, or even emergently stopping instruments.

The DynaMon analyzer collects seismic signals from the accelerometers and calculate the magnitudes (gal, cm/sec2) of each accelerometer at different positions. Once two or more (configurable) magnitudes is higher than the threshold, DynaMon analyzer triggers specific IO terminals to broadcast or stop instruments.

We adopted WebAccess to be an edge SCADA in this case. Users are allowed to observe the real-time magnitudes, query the long-term trend of the magnitudes, and query the history of the alarm messages. They are also allowed to control the broadcasting system and the instrument interlock interface remotely.

Benefits

The DynaMon monitoring system has been successfully detects times of earthquakes without sending any fault alarm caused by random artificial vibrations.

The cost of four points DynaMon earthquake monitoring system is approximate one third of the cost of traditional seismographs. In addition to the vibration signals can be transformed into 1/3 Octave domain and compared with the VC specification, which is not available in a seismograph.

Who texol

texol has been focusing on vibration and acoustic research more than 10 years. We not only deliver monitoring system to robot users, but also provide spectrum analysis software and design consulting service to the machine makers. Our turnkey solution enables the machine be designed well, assembled well, and worked well.

Why DynaMon

DynaMon system has several key features which are very appropriate for earthquakes monitoring in the photo areas in a semiconductor fab:

Solution