Applied Materials
Key words: Process Control, Motion Control, User Interface (UI)
As an independent software consultant my software revisions made the Precision 5000 Wafer
fabrication mainframe a better piece of equipment. (On the word, “mainframe” I
believe that is what they called it. Whatever the name, it was the front end to
up to 4 potentially different wafer process ovens.) The mainframe unit delivered
wafers to process ovens and removed them when the ovens were finished.
Code in the mainframe unit also ran the various process ovens. I was never
involved with any process oven code.
The Precision 5000 used VME cards one of which held a Motorola 68020. I
maintained and wrote new modules in both 68K assembly and Pascal. Software
development and maintenance was made difficult because I/O to mainframe and
chamber components had grown without sufficient foresight. (My personal guess
was that new process chambers took precedence over concerns about mainframe
software complexity.)
Development was done in some DEC VAX environment. As with other new development
environments I quickly learned how to use it.
I was the key person on four main features: a new heat
exchanger, the search for lost stepper pulses,
position error recovery and a
fix for a wafer breakage problem.