Fault Detection for Factory Equipment

Learn the latest in Intel IT's approach to fault detection for factory equipment.

For many years, Intel IT has utilized a standard infrastructure with Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) sensors and Intel® IoT Gateways for various applications on the factory floor. Simultaneously, we have employed a separate and expensive vendor-based system for fault detection and classification (FDC) on factory equipment. This system has contributed to reduced factory downtime and enhanced predictive maintenance on certain subfab equipment, such as pumps, gas abatement systems, chillers, and more.

To lower costs, increase quality and accelerate necessary changes in the factory, we explored displacing the vendor’s system with our standardized IoT infrastructure. We also added new, innovative command-and-control capabilities. As we connected tools to our IIoT infrastructure, our system proved to be 10x less expensive than the vendor’s solution. It is also more flexible and can communicate with open standards and proprietary protocols.

The “brains” of the system are a collection of Python drivers—written by software developers in any Intel group who wants to contribute to the code—that control both the data collection and the command-and-control capabilities. This open-source solution has zero license costs and democratizes the solution; if another machine needs closed-loop control, an engineer can simply add a new driver to the library. The solution consists of the data collection plane and the control plane:

• Data collection plane. Python drivers set up the communication with the equipment, collect data, analyze and format the data, and publish it to consuming applications using the message queue telemetry transport (MQTT) protocol.

• Control plane. The same Python drivers apply logic to create the control command, send the command to the relevant equipment and verify that it succeeded. The result of the command is published to the appropriate backend manufacturing system, again using MQTT.

Having demonstrated lower costs and improved product quality, we are now scaling our IIoT-based FDC solution to over a thousand subfab tools. We estimate the solution’s value as high as USD 16 million for just a single factory that contains hundreds of subfab entities that support the wafer-etching process.