Abstract:
An information management and tracking system manages and tracks artifact data relating to the development of a process, the artifact data including data relating to development experiment parameters, results and products. The system includes a data management component and a process design environment for retaining data relating to the process design. A development tracking environment retains data relating to the process development, including the artifacts. A back annotation environment receives process data and provides it to the development tracking environment. The data management component is arranged to control the process design environment, development tracking environment and back annotation environment such that, in use, the data received and stored therein can be accessed in a linked manner such that, in use, a user can obtain data from each environment and view links there between.

Description:
CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS  
       [0001]     This application is a continuation of International Application No. PCT/GB2005/001175, filed on Mar. 24, 2005, entitled “Information Management and Tracking System (IMTS),” which claims priority under 35 U.S.C. §119 to Application No. UK0406663.5 filed on Mar. 24, 2004, entitled “Information Management and Tracking System (IMTS),” the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference.  
       FIELD OF THE INVENTION  
       [0002]     The present invention relates to a system for supporting and tracking thin processes such as film based process development with focus on managing the process development activities and tracking them during their progress as well as the development artifacts such as Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM)/Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) images; measurement results; characterization data and the like.  
       BACKGROUND  
       [0003]     The present invention provides a system for managing and tracking one or more information entities associated with one or more operations, with the or each entity capable of being cross-referenced with the or each operation so as to augment a network of information that is storable in the system and accessible through corresponding applications.  
         [0004]     Today technology information from a process development, such as a CMOS process development derived from simulation, test productions, tests or measurements is usually kept informally and non-systematically on paper, in electronic spread sheets, or merely in the minds of the process engineers and is hence hardly accessible for use in future process development projects or process porting activities. Furthermore development data or development artifacts, e.g., SEM images, test results, run cards etc., are mostly stored in an unstructured, unrelated way resulting in insufficient reproducibility, less knowledge gain, less development control, less statistical data etc. Therefore there is a strong need for the use of structured formal methods and business/development processes to store this data in a way that makes retrieval and reuse of collected data/knowledge possible and easy to manage.  
         [0005]     One major source for this unstructured storage of process development artifacts is, that is difficult, if not impossible to define a generic always valid categorization which could be used to structure the data. Because of this it is necessary to be able to access this process development data from diverse points of views. To achieve this, a general and flexible measure is required to store the data in such a way allowing these different views to be created easily from a single representation. This invention proposes such a generic storage mechanism.  
         [0006]     No current software system takes care of the above mentioned insufficiencies to the full extent. Some parts are addressed by the products such as CoreDB, OperatorDB and Process Flow of PhoenixBV, which take care of the process parameter and flow storage of the performed processing. Other tools like Promis, marketed by Brooks Automation, are more focused on issues related to the management of production lines, like fab monitoring, yield improvements, and are not targeted for process development where a lot of experiments/simulations are required to generate an appropriate process flow for the intended devices. The basic difference between these two areas is that during the development a lot of process step combinations and step parameters settings are tested to adjust the final device properties into the intended area of operation. The production control area is more focused on a smaller amount of different processes with a much lesser degree of freedom in the steps and therefore more emphasis is placed on the statistical evaluation and comparison between intended and actual properties.  
         [0007]     The above mentioned, commercially available tools miss features incorporating all kinds of measurements results, e.g., pictures, material composition analysis sheets, development related documentation, cause-and-effect analysis results and so on into the knowledge base. Because of this they miss out a major part of knowledge conservation and knowledge generation because they do not provide the possibility of closing the loop and comparing a real result with predicted result and use the differences to recalibrate the knowledge base.  
       SUMMARY  
       [0008]     The present invention overcomes the above mentioned insufficiencies by introducing artifact management and process parameter and flow tracking. The invention treats all artifacts related to process development work as “documents” storable in files viewable with an associated application. Because often non extendable standard formats are used by the equipment/vendors/users it is hardly possible to extend the used formats to add the meta data required for knowledge storage and retrieval, e.g., tagging artifacts/documents with keywords or status information. The present invention therefore builds a shell/wrapper around this native data providing the possibility to add meta data for knowledge storage, e.g., keywords, status information, associated results, conclusions, etc., in a flexible and user extendable manner. Additionally the invention offers flexible search mechanisms powered by a search engine enabling specifically tailored searches.  
         [0009]     A distinguishing feature of the present invention is the ability to tie these artifacts together by relating them to each other and to the detailed captures of the parameter settings for the different process steps and to the complete process flow. Thus, the invention enables the direct viewing of the impact and changes of the parameters as well as the impact of the concrete flow on the results, thereby providing more insight into the cause-and-effect-chain during the process development.  
         [0010]     The above and still further features and advantages of the present invention will become apparent upon consideration of the following definitions, descriptions and descriptive figures of specific embodiments thereof. While these descriptions go into specific details of the invention, it should be understood that variations may and do exist and would be apparent to those skilled in the art based on the descriptions herein. 
     
    
     BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS  
       [0011]     Examples of the present invention will now be described, only with reference to the accompanying drawings in which:  
         [0012]      FIG. 1  is a schematic flow diagram showing the general architecture of a process design and tracking environment according to the invention;  
         [0013]      FIGS. 2 and 3  are schematic diagrams showing a general and specific architecture applied in an example of the present invention;  
         [0014]      FIG. 4  is a more detailed schematic diagram showing the system of the present invention;  
         [0015]      FIG. 5  is a schematic diagram showing data being presented by the system of the present invention to a user;  
         [0016]      FIG. 6  is a schematic diagram showing user access through the system can follow; and  
         [0017]      FIG. 7  is a general schematic diagram showing the interaction of a system according to the invention realized over a computer network. 
     
    
       [0018]     In the examples of the present invention, an example process of semiconductor wafer fabrication has been used, although it would be appreciated that the present invention can be applied to other processes, such as pharmaceutical development.  
         [0019]     To facilitate the understanding of the invention, the term “artifact” refers to any kind of hard development result or reference produced or used during a development project and kept in some sort of file or link. This includes all documentation such as but not limited to reports, text collections, and spreadsheets, produced by a user as well as all kinds of electronically generated documentation of test files, images, and pictures having a variety of formats and usually kept as files. Additionally it could be references to external sources relevant to the development process or a project. The system based on the invention is able to store and track meta-data about these artifacts among other things.  
         [0020]     The term “entities” groups together all relevant development dimensions of the application domain used or produced during a research and development process as well as artificial data groups like meta-data about a specific dimension.  
       DETAILED DESCRIPTION  
       [0021]      FIG. 1  shows a schematic of the general architecture of the process design and tracking environment  200  and its interactions, which represents the interfaces between the different environments, the flow of information between them and the role of the environments in a large system. The system  200  comprises: the process design and development tracking environment  210  representing the core of the system; simulation environment  220  for simulating process steps and flows; the semiconductor fabrication facility environment  230 ; and the assessment environment  240 . As data is input from the step and flow data line  224  to the Simulation environments, the simulation results can flow back to the process design and development tracking environment  210  via simulation result line  222 . Here the simulation results can be assessed via the planned inspections line  228  by the assessment environment  240  in which testing or measurement for example may be assessed.  
         [0022]     Similarly details from the fabrication facility including actual production control and/or real parameter settings environment  230  for example can flow to the process design and development tracking environment  210  via the real settings flow line  232 . Machine setting data  226  can flow to and from the process design and development tracking environment  210  and the semiconductor fabrication facility environment  230 . Such an architecture is not limited to a semiconductor process environment but may be equally applied to other technical areas such as active ingredient development for medicine, biological or chemical processes.  
         [0023]     This architecture permits knowledge conservation and knowledge generation to compare real results with predicted results and use the differences to recalibrate the knowledge base, for example the loop  236  back from the “testing” to the process design and development tracking environment  210  as shown in  FIG. 2 .  
         [0024]      FIG. 2  shows the general architecture embodying the invention characterized by the analogy of a spider web  100  comprising a plurality of nodes wherein each node is accessible from another node depending on the distance and the strength of the relation via other nodes. The nodes themselves may be in different dimensions containing information or knowledge relating for example to the development of a product. This enables the incorporation of views from different angles/perspective from a user, who could be a person or may be a system.  
         [0025]     For example, dimension  1  nodes  130  may represent experiments performed on products or samples, dimension  2  nodes  135  may represent a batch of drugs from the pharmaceutical industries, dimension  3  nodes  140  may represent the individual drugs from a particular batch, while the artifact nodes  145 , represented here as documents could be images, abstract or the like, contain the artifacts. The different systems based on the invention can capture data about all useful development dimensions, for example in semiconductor process development, such as experiments, lots, wafers and the artifacts are all considered as a document which can be any type of file. All collected dimensions can be related together where every item is relatable to every other, inside and outside the dimension.  FIG. 3  shows the source “web” applied to semi-conductor processes.  
         [0026]     The management system of the invention provides a system having the ability to tie these artifacts together by relating them to each other and especially being able to relate them to the detailed captures of other dimensions of the research and development environment of the application domain. This enables the user to derive and see impacts on experiment parameters and their changes as well as the impacts of the differently executed experiments on the results; thereby it is possible to get more insight into the cause-and-effect-chain of research and development degrees of freedom. In  FIG. 2 , the different types of correlation and relations that could be made are represented by the lines interfacing the different dimensions, for example, line  150  correlates a node in dimension  2  with a node in dimension  1  and vice versa.  
         [0027]     To add information to a system based on the invention quickly with the least amount of effort possible, the system may contain features to automatically populate the artifact database from the file system. For this they should read through a configurable directory structure containing files and directories fulfilling agreed patterns and populate the artifacts and other dimensions from the found files or directories. Additionally relations between corresponding entities should be created to build up the web; in addition, keywords are attached to the created entities.  
         [0028]     In a further embodiment of the invention as shown on  FIG. 3 a  web structure  300  shows an example from the semiconductor industry as to where information is stored in different dimensions of the research and development effort of a product and how correlation can be made to derive useful information regarding its status. In  FIG. 3 , a first dimension of information is represented by a series of experiments  310 , a second dimension represents a series of lots of semiconductor wafers  320 , while a third dimension represents individual semiconductors  330  and the artifacts  340  represent documents containing, for example but not limited to, text comments, images and similar information.  
         [0029]     Relations can be made by following the different lines interfacing the different dimensions. For example, a user can track the progress of a wafer. It is related to a semiconductor lot via interface line  346 . This lot may have undergone certain production steps at the wafer fabrication facility and the information about that will be stored at that node in the dimension. A turn is interfaced at line  347  and is associated with a particular experiment. This tells the user that certain experiments were undertaken with a particular methodology.  
         [0030]     Hence, there information storage and relational features of the invention permits inter-dimensional correlations and intra-dimensional correlations so as to display to the user what information is available about it how they are related to different stages of a processing environment. In this way the user can identify different process steps undertaken at different stages at the manufacturing facility, where the lots or batches were processed and how, what experiments were performed on them, what images for example are stored and can be viewed by the user through the artifacts.  
         [0031]     Further to the general concept illustrated in  FIG. 1 ,  FIG. 4  which shows the environment and architecture of the information management and tracking system (IMTS)  400  embodying the invention comprising: a data management unit  410  for at least managing data from the design and tracking environment; a process design unit  420  for managing and storing process design information; a process development tracking unit  430 ; a back annotation unit  450 ; a use/role management unit  455 ; and a document management unit  460 .  
         [0032]     The data management unit  410  further comprises: a design environment data module  411  for handling data for the process design unit  420 ; a process development tracking data module  412  for handling data for process development tracking environment  430  and the back annotation unit  450 ; a miscellaneous data module  413  and file data module  414  handle data for the use/role management unit  455  and document management unit  460  respectively.  
         [0033]     The process design unit  420  further comprises: a process flow design module  422 ; a process step design module  421 ; and an import/export module  423 .  
         [0034]     The data process development tracking unit  430  further comprises: a data maintenance module  440 ; a retrieval module  445 ; and an import/export module  431 . The data maintenance module  440  further comprising dimensions, as described hereinbefore, of at least process flow  440   a , process step  440   b ; artifacts  440   c ; wafer  440   d ; design  440   e ; experiment  440   g ; and a project  440   h . The retrieval module  445  is at least capable of: searching  445   a , navigation  445   b , reporting  445   c  and statistical assessment  445   d.    
         [0035]     Referring to  FIG. 4 , the back annotation unit  450  further comprises: an import/export module  451 ; a scheduling module  452 ; and a tracking population module  453 .  
         [0036]     The process design unit  420  can interact, as required, with a simulation unit  500  to provide data to and receive data from during process development. The process design unit  420  also provides appropriate data via its import/export module  423  to external systems  510  as well as to fabrication and assessment environments  230 ,  240 . Data from the fabrication and assessment environments,  230 ,  240  is fed back into the system via the back annotation unit  450 , which in turn can feed the information, as required, to the process development tracking unit  430 .  
         [0037]     The components of the system are controlled to ensure that data can be presented to the user in a manner of the type shown in  FIG. 5 . As can be seen from this figure, a project overview display  600  can be provided and within that individual experiment modules  610  can be displayed with data representing, in this example, to particular manufacturing lots, the wafers produced in those lots, as well as any artifacts associated with the particular experiment being drawn in and linked to the particular experiment for ease of understanding of the user. Links can be provided to adjacent experiment where, for example, common wafers or common lots have been employed, so that, again, a user can have an informed overview of the project and understand the links between particular experiments, lots, wafers and artifacts as required.  FIG. 6  shows how a user can move through the data from the project screen.  
         [0038]      FIG. 7  shows how the system  400  of the present invention can interact, in use, with simulation or application systems  500  to provide and obtain appropriate data as well as with user presentation systems  700  to provide and receive input data from users either remotely, e.g., perhaps through an internet-based system, or at a fixed base.  
         [0039]     As will be appreciated from the above, the present invention provides an information management and tracking system which is capable of receiving project data from a number of sources, process and collate that data, and then enable its presentation to a user in a manner which ensures the user can obtain an appropriate overview of the system to manage a development process in a manner not provided previously.  
         [0040]     While the invention has been described in detail with reference to specific embodiments thereof, it will be apparent to one skilled in the art that various changes and modifications can be made therein without departing from the spirit and scope thereof. Accordingly, it is intended that the present invention covers the modifications and variations of this invention provided they come within the scope of the appended claims and their equivalents.