Pain Points

The wafers in equipment sometimes get irreparable damaged when the dry pump connected to this equipment suddenly crash. Those crash, especially happen to the oxidation furnace process, may give rise to a financial material loss of 50 – 100 thousand USD each time. Financial downtime losses caused by the unpredicted crash is not even included in this calculation.

Therefore, semiconductor plants want to cost-effectively prevent unpredicted dry pump crash without increasing their annual maintenance cost on the dry pumps.

Challenges

Real Engagement

texol provided professional training course and consulting service to our customers so that they are able to build up a robust AURORA monitoring system following the engagement process described below by themselves.

The rotors are the most fragile components in a dry pump. The pair of rotors shall keep very close distance and not contact in normal operation. However, the crystal in the air duct is sometimes sucked into the rotors and leads to the friction between them. When more and more crystal come into the rotors, they get wear or they suddenly get stuck. This is one of the major crash modes of dry pumps.

First of all, users collected the design diagram and the operational condition of the dry pumps and calculated the theoretical spectrum features of several major crash modes.

Meanwhile, they used DynaView spectrum and feature analyzer to collect the vibration signals of more than 20 Ebara dry pumps. In DynaView, they investigate and benchmark the theoretical spectrum features of motors and rotors in a real spectrum.

Secondly, the users deployed several 4-channel PC-based monitoring systems DynaMon which have beenconfigured in the spectrum features of rotor wear and other fail-modes to dozens of dry pumps. DynaMon system not only monitors the health conditions online, it also records the vibration signals periodically. These signals are compatible with DynaView so the users keep investigating and benchmarking the new features if they appear.

Simultaneously, a cost-effective Aurora wireless monitoring system including numerous smart BLE endnodes, gateways and a data and device management software (DDMS) is being deployed to the other dry pumps gradually.

Benefits

The DynaMon monitoring system successfully sent an alert to users 27 days before a real crash of the dry pump. A wafer material loss of 100 thousand USD supposed to happen by this one-time crash is successfully fended off.

Hundreds of dry pumps in one semiconductor plant are now going to be monitored by Aurora system. A semiconductor plant can save 500 to 700 thousand USD yearly by preventing unpredicted crash of these dry pumps.

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 Aurora

Aurora system has several key features which are very appropriate for robot monitoring:

Solution