An industrial feedback on the use of OPC UA for the vertical integration of semiconductor front-ends

As manufacturing, in general, is adopting Industry 4.0, OPC UA is gaining traction to become the de facto architecture for overcoming the issues of interoperability. Even though semiconductor equipment manufacturers need to comply with the existing and now mature SEMI11SEMI is a semiconductor association that defines standards. All SEMI standards referenced in this article are accessible at https://www.semi.org standards, it is worthwhile to explore the possibilities of harmonizing them with other automation standards. Following the same motivation, OPC Foundation has developed standardized companion specifications for different other standards like ISA-95, PROFINET, IO-Link, etc. In the absence of a companion specification for semiconductor industry, this work compares the architectural choices for the development of an information model for semiconductor industry. We share the lessons learned from our endeavors in implementing OPC UA information models for semiconductor domain.