Patent ID: 7359759

Claim:
A computer program product, comprising: a tangible computer-readable medium having encoded thereon a series of instructions for use by at least one computer, wherein the instructions are for establishing a learning control model in a virtual metrology application, and wherein the application comprises: an electronic design assembly (EDA) interface including: an EDA interface management module configured to manage the EDA interface; a sensor data pre-processing mechanism configured to gather data from a plurality of production equipment sensors in real-time and pre-process the data; and a metrology data interface configured to gather actual metrology data collected by a plurality of metrology tools, wherein the actual metrology data is compared with forecast data to automatically adjust attributes of the control model; and a common information model (CIM) interface including: a control model development module configured to develop a control model that learns tool monitoring data, wherein the control model development module uses an artificial neural network to produce a learning control model by learning from the artificial neural network modeling, fault detection and classification data, and real monitoring data; a CIM integration module configured to integrate with a statistical process control (SPC) system for metrology data collection, and further configured to integrate with a manufacturing execution system (MES), wherein data from the SPC system and the MES is used to improve the learning capabilities of the learning control model; and an experiment design module configured to design experiments based on the learning control model.