Towards building OPC-UA companions for semi-conductor domain

Abstract

Semi-conductor industry have been handling for decades some of Industry 4.0 concepts mainly related to the remote control and the monitoring of the equipment and devices. In such industries, production jobs are launched on aggregated set of equipment responsible of the execution of the production process. Each equipment is controlled by a host. Such configurations allow the semi-conductor fabs to be highly flexible since jobs are not constrained to a single machine and a single machine can process several times the same product. SECS/GEM (SEMI Equipment Communications Standard/Generic Equipment Model) standards define the minimum specifications for the equipment/host interfaces. In this paper, we assess SECS/GEM standards against Industry 4.0 communication architecture OPC-UA. We show the complementarity between both standards and propose an approach to translate the specifications stacks of SECS/GEM standards towards OPC-UA information models. We first build UML models from which we generate services that must be exhibited by the host and the equipment interfaces and then we generate from these UML models specific OPC-UA address space model for SECS/GEM that will be deployed on OPC-UA servers and accessible by OPC-UA clients.