Experiment Management Tutorial#

Overview#

During process or product development, you need to carry out a series of controlled variations to determine whether the effect of each variation is positive or negative. There are many possible variations, such as testing new materials, new suppliers, new recipes, new equipment, new durables (for example, reticles), and new methods. An experiment consists of designing such a set of variations and the subsequent execution on the shop floor. Furthermore, when it is possible to identify and track sub-materials individually, such as semiconductor wafers, it's important to define multiple variations for specific sub-materials in the same lot. There are also particular challenges when trying to combine experiment lots with production lots, especially in high-volume manufacturing – the execution of such an experiment must be as smooth and transparent as possible to both the operators and manufacturing applications.

The Experiment Management module supports both the design of the experiment (DoE) and the execution of the experiment. Because it's a fully integrated module, the execution of the experiment is completely transparent to both the users and the applications that support manufacturing operations. The experiment lots are tracked and processed just like any other lot, with the variations being set and enforced automatically by the system.

This feature of Critical Manufacturing MES enables efficient learning because it accelerates the learning curve. It increases visibility, tracking, and monitoring of experiments, and increases operational efficiency, essentially mitigating human errors.

Content#

This tutorial includes the following pages:

• Introduction
• Configuring an Experiment Definition
• Using the Experiment Management Module