Infineon and the history of Objective.Matisse APS

If the name Matisse brings to mind the neo-impressionist artist and the leader of the Fauvist movement you would be close, but in this context it refers to Manufacturing toolset used in the reticle production in our mask house in Munich. MaTISSe is short for „Manufacturing Toolset with Integration and Synchronization of Services“. 

The History

The production of masks (reticles) requires a complex set of sequenced and layered production steps. These process steps are controlled by using a manufacturing execution system (MES). The IT environment ensures that each blank mask receives the correct design. At the end of a production run the masks are checked for defects and so controlling the quality of the product so only perfect masks are delivered to the customer.

The Manufacturing Execution System (MES) “Workstream” has been in use by Infineon (earlier Siemens Halbleiter) since 1987. Workstream controls the sequence of the “Operations” and the single process steps used during Mask (reticle) manufacture. MaTISSe has been running in parallel to Workstream for the past 10 years. MaTISSe covered the missing functionality required by the manufacturing community, and the first version ran typically in the background as a module.

During the past few years it was realized that Workstream no longer filled the requirements and was not flexible enough to cover the growing need for more functionality. As some of the missing functionality was already running in parallel, a decision was made to replace all Workstream functionality with MaTISSe.

The Milestones

In April 2001 a six month task was started to bring both systems’ data to the same level. The building of the interfaces started in October and lasted three months. In December the system was released for production testing. The Beta-test phase ran four months until April 2002, at which time the systems could be switched over. As the migration could only happen online both systems ran in parallel and every effort was made to keep the data in synchronization. After the four month parallel run the decision was made to turn off Workstream and run exclusively with MaTISSe.

During the conversion a downtime of only two hours was required including tests. After the switch the interface to Workstream was turned off.

As insurance the interface is still available in case it would be required to transfer data back to Workstream.

The Success

The data collected by MaTISSe can be visualized by the standard tool “Cerberus“. The main advantage of MaTISSe is the open interface capability and modular configuration. It conforms to the Infineon architecture roadmap. A further advantage of MaTISSe is the database independence by using CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) to build the basis components for the communication in distributed applications. The middleware ensures location, platform and implementation independence.

The Team

In 2001 a team was built consisting of Line Control and Information Technology employees, to introduce MaTISSe into the line as the MES.

Next Steps

It is planned to achieve an uptime of 99.7% and to take over the responsibility of maintenance internally.

The MaTISSe system is a product of the company Nimble(*).

(*) Nimble was acquired by De Clercq Solutions in March 2006. More info