Industry
Control systems for semiconductor fabs
Nobody in a fab asks for a control upgrade because they want one. They ask because a controller is obsolete, a scrubber trip took out a tool bank, or an audit found the utility system has no documented interlock matrix.
Fab utility control has an unusual risk profile. The individual systems are not complex by process-industry standards — pumps, fans, valves, a heat exchanger. What is difficult is that they are all interlocked, they all run continuously, and the consequence of getting one wrong lands somewhere else entirely, on a tool that costs more than the entire utility plant.
That shapes how we work here: the interlock matrix gets documented before anything is touched, rollback is proved before a changeover, and shutdown windows are planned around the fab's schedule rather than ours.
Where we are usually called in
- An obsolete PLC on a PCW or vacuum system that can no longer be supported or spared
- Scrubber and extraction control that trips more often than the process justifies
- A SCADA system with no working backup and nobody left who wrote it
- Alarm floods during upsets that mask the alarm that mattered
- Utility metering and reporting demanded by a corporate energy programme
- Panel or drive replacement where the original hardware is no longer available
On shutdown windows
Fabs do not offer long windows and rarely offer convenient ones. Everything that can be built and proved off-line is — panel, program, screens — so the window is spent on changeover, with a tested route back to the original system if the restart does not hold.
Questions we get asked
Next step
Running semiconductor plant?
Tell us which system, which platform, and what the constraint is. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right firm for it.
An engineer responds within one business day.