Apis Click&Trace Message Library Concepts

Purpose

The scope of the APIS Click&Trace (ACT) message library is to provide a way for interfacing information from production systems and other external systems to the APIS Click&Trace system. The library consists of simple atomic and general transaction messages, common in production, tracking and MES environments. The objective is, for interface developers to translate physical events, from the process or information from external databases, to transaction messages in the ACT Message Library. Complex transactions can be assembled from the set of simple and atomic transactions available in the ACT Message Library. The ACT Message Library transactions are translated, by ACT product components, to more complex and proprietary transactions used against the APIS Click&Trace database. Hence the ACT Message Library is the bridge language (pivot language) used for translations between external equipment or systems and the APIS Click&Trace database.

ACT Message concepts

In order to utilize the ACT Message Library, it is important to understand the concepts that the messages (transactions) are built on. The concepts are aimed to be as general as possible, not specific to any process or system.

Native transaction

The term native transaction refers to the transaction or event in the equipment or external database from which an ACT message originates.

Native transaction ID

The Native transaction ID is an identification of the native transaction from which an ACT message originates. The purpose of the native transaction id is to follow the transactional information through the different communication layers for debugging purposes. If the native transaction is unknown, or not available at the time the ACT message is generated, a new native transaction id can be generated or the native transaction id may be left blank.

Event time

The term event time refers to the time when a physical event took place. The event time should always be UTC based. All ACT messages has one and only one event time. It is not possible to refer events happening at different times with the same ACT Message.

Equipment location

This is a definite physical location in the production environment. Equipment locations are typically definite locations inside a production tool where material can reside or where events of different types can take place. However, an equipment location does not necessary has to be inside a physical equipment. It can just as well model a physical location such as the “production floor”, “behind the electrical cabinet”, “the storage room” and so on.

Equipment location name

An equipment location name is a string that uniquely identifies an Equipment Location as uniquely as possible.

Equipment state

The equipment state is the definition of the current condition of equipment in terms of KPI reporting. Examples of equipment states are OEE states and SEMI E10 states. Equipment states relate to Equipment locations. An equipment location may only have one state at a time.

Material

A material is a substance that can move around in the production facility.

Discrete material

A discrete material is a definite amount of identifiable material that cannot be directly divided into smaller amounts of material or joined to form larger amounts of material.

Material amount

The term amount (Material amount) refers to the physical amount of material represented by a discrete material entity. Amounts are typically mass such as “kilograms of Si in an Ingot” or numbers  such as “number of wafers in a box”, or “number of wafers in a wafer”.

Material group

The term material group refers to a set of related discrete material entities. All the material entities in a material group can be identified by one common identifier. Examples of material groups are “all the wafers on the carrier” which can be identified by a carrier id or “all the boxes on a pallet” which can be identified by a pallet id.

Material attributes

Material attributes are information units that identifies the material and/or describe the properties of the material. The attributes are generally intensive properties of the material, i.e. properties that do not depend on the size or amount of the material entity. There are four groups of material attributes:

  • Material Quality Attributes. The material quality attributes describe the properties of the material in terms of value. A material may have one material quality attribute. The quality attribute is a text string describing the value of the material, e.g.”A-spec product”, “rework material” or “scrap”.
  • Article Attributes. The article attributes are most commonly used to identify a product by its properties. Article numbers are also often called product codes or item numbers. Articles do not identify specific instances of material, but is rather a way to group material with similar properties, such as vendor, size, efficiency, color and so on. A material may have one article attribute.
  • Identifier Attributes. The identifier attributes are used to identify materials. They are usually human- and/or machine readable tags that are used to identify material in the process. A material entity may have multiple Identifier attributes. An identifier attribute consists of two text strings, one describing the type of identifier and another describing the value of the identifier. Example: Type: Bar Code Label, Value: 122215-21-54-1
  • Data Attributes. Data attributes are multi purpose attributes that describe general intensive properties of the material, such as color, temperature, texture and so on. A material may have multiple Data attributes. A data attribute consists of two text strings, one describing the type of attribute and another describing the value of the attribute. Example: Type: Color, Value: RED

Interface developers are free to define the information available in the orignal transaction as quality, article, identifier or data or a combination. It is important to think about what the MES system need the data for. Some guidelines apply:

  • Numerical data should be defined as data attributes.
  • Information used to identity material should at least be defined as identifier attributes
  • If in doubt, model string based data as a combination of all the different attribute types.
  • Remember that the MES system may need the same data as different attribute types, so do not hesitate to make combinations.

Attribute key

An attribute key is a special type of material attribute that serves as temporary link between a material and its attributes in situations when either the material is not known at the time of registering an attribute or the attribute is not known at time of registering the material. Attribute keys are most often used when material tracking information and material measurements originates from different equipments. Attribute keys are typically used by measuring equipments which do not directly know the material that the measurements belong to. Attributes that are temporarily registered based on attribute keys are referred to as Interim Attributes.

Tracking identifier

A tracking identifier is an identifier that identifies the same material over a set of equipment locations.

Group identifier

The group identifier is an alternative to the tracking identifier in equipment locations where it is impossible to identify distinct material entities. Group identification makes it possible to reference multiple material entities as a material group by the use of one single group identifier. A group identifier consists of two parts:

  • Group value which identifies the material group as a whole.
  • Position value which identifies material in the group by the position in the group, e.g. slot in a carrier.

To identify the group as a whole, the position value should be left blank.