Reducing Costs Using Wireless Sensors for
Cylinder Monitoring: A Case Study
BY PAUL NESDORE
How non-invasive sensors can monitor key cylinder
characteristics such as pressure and weight to reduce
downtime and man-hours
The Challenge
Micrel owns a 150mm fab with a capacity of 30,000 wafer starts per month. The fab was constructed in the 1980s and is considered a legacy fab without the
full benefits of current automation technology.
The company constantly assesses technology upgrades
to reduce cost and improve productivity in order to keep
their competitive edge. Managing the use of process
gases, which is labor intensive and prone to gas shortages and/or waste, was identified as a key area of potential
improvement.
The Solution
To prevent shortages and waste from occurring, Micrel
installed new automation technology that did not incur
disruption to ongoing processes and required minimal
installation cost. The solution was a non-invasive wireless sensor which “clips-on” to existing gauges and/or
transducers.
Background
As new semiconductor fabs continue to be built globally, there are over a hundred mature fabs in the United
States and many more worldwide that are still the workhorses of the industry. These legacy fabs are often twenty
years or older, and produce millions of chips for a huge
array of electronics every day. While many newer fabs
have automation features built in to enable peak efficiency and performance, older fabs seek new solutions
to increase productivity, reduce downtime, and decrease
operating costs.
Micrel is such a company. Located in San Jose, California,
Micrel manufactures product for the analog, Ethernet and
high bandwidth markets. The company manufactures
high performance analog, power, advanced mixed-signal
and radio frequency semiconductors, high speed com-
munication, clock management, and Ethernet switch and
physical layer transceiver integrated circuits. End markets
served include cell phones, portable and enterprise com-
puting, enterprise and home networking, wide area and
metropolitan area networks and industrial equipment.
Founded in 1978, Micrel has been profitable for 25 of its 26
years with revenues of $280M and regional sales and sup-
port offices, distributors and technology design centers
throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia.
Gas Level Monitoring
For Micrel, it is critical to minimize unplanned downtime
at its core San Jose 150mm fab. At this facility, which has
a capacity of 30,000 wafer starts per month and houses
500 semiconductor manufacturing tools, wafer production requires hundreds of process recipes that use various
combinations of gases to produce the desired chips. It is
critical that the required gases are provided for each wafer
process step or the output will be unusable resulting in
system downtime. Semiconductor production hinges
