Manufacturing of integrated circuit devices using a global predictive monitoring system

A method for making integrated circuit devices, comprising:

• performing production steps, in a manufacturing facility, to form structures on wafers;
• using a global predictive monitoring system to monitor the manufacturing facility by:
• using a plurality of individually separate and independent agents distributed on different computers in the manufacturing facility, each of the agents being configured to (i) receive a set of inputs for calculating and outputting a risk value indicative of production yield, (ii) calculate and output a risk value indicative of production yield, and (iii) calculate and output a quality value indicative of a reliability of the calculated risk value;
• and,
• using an agent response collector configured to receive outputs of the plurality of agents to generate a projection indicative of a health of production in the manufacturing facility.

A method for manufacturing integrated circuit devices, comprising:

• performing production steps, in an IC device fabrication facility, to form structures on wafers;
• and,
• monitoring the IC device fabrication facility by:
• creating an initial population of agents in the fabrication facility, each of the agents being configured to (i) receive at least one input comprising data collected on a route of a wafer being processed in the fabrication facility, (ii) calculate and output a risk value indicative of production yield, and (iii) calculate and output a quality value indicative of a reliability of the calculated risk value;
• creating new agents from agents in the initial population of agents to create a new population of agents;
• and,
• generating a projection indicative of a trend of a production yield in the fabrication facility based, at least in part, on outputs from agents in the new population of agents.

A method for manufacturing integrated circuit devices, comprising:

• performing production steps, in an IC device fabrication facility, to form structures on wafers;
• and,
• monitoring the IC device fabrication facility by:
• running a plurality of individually separate and independent agents in computers in the fabrication facility, each agent in the plurality of agents being configured to (i) receive a limited set of input data from a central database, (ii) calculate a first value indicative of a yield of a production process in the fabrication facility, and (iii) calculate a second value indicative of a reliability of the first value;
• collecting outputs from the plurality of agents to generate a collected output;
• and,
• performing statistical analysis on the collected output to determine a trend of the yield of the production process.