Patent ID: 7801635

Claim:
A method of processing a wafer comprising: receiving the wafer and wafer data, wherein the wafer is received by an etching subsystem, a wafer state is established for the wafer, and the wafer data includes historical and/or real-time data; receiving, by one or more Transparent Coupling Devices (TCDs) associated with the etching subsystem, a first input message including a first pass-through message, or a first real-time feed-forward message, or any combination thereof, wherein the first pass-through message includes first historical wafer data and the first real-time feed-forward message includes first real-time wafer data, wherein the first input message includes a first output message from a Manufacturing Execution System (MES), a processing subsystem, or a measurement subsystem, or any combination thereof; feed forwarding, by the one or more TCDs associated with the etching subsystem, the first real-time feed-forward message to one or more controllers in the etch subsystem when a first feed-forward state is a first value and/or when the first input message includes the first real-time feed-forward message, wherein the first real-time feed-forward message is not fed forward when the first feed-forward state is a second value and/or when the first input message does not include the first real-time feed-forward message; generating, by the one or more controllers in the etch subsystem, tuned etching recipe data, tuned etching profile data, or tuned etching modeling data, or any combination thereof using one or more etch-related Real-Time Parameter Tuning (RTPT) procedures, wherein a first etch-related RTPT procedure uses the first real-time wafer data as tuning data when a first RTPT state is a first value, wherein the tuned etching recipe data, the tuned etching profile data, or the tuned etching model data, or any combination thereof is not generated when the first RTPT state is a second value; creating, by the one or more controllers in the etch subsystem, an updated etch process recipe using the tuned etching recipe data, the tuned etching profile data, or the tuned etching model data, or any combination thereof when a first update state is a first value, wherein the updated etch process recipe is not created when the first update state is a second value; etching the wafer in the etching subsystem using the updated etch process recipe when the update state is the first value; identifying the wafer etched using the updated etch process as an updated wafer by changing the wafer state for the etched wafer; and storing etching data associated with the updated wafer as updated etching data.