Quick guide to MRL furnace control software
R. Prohaska 1/26/2010

Overview

The software contains two components, a "cell manager" that 
provides communications services to the furnace controllers 
and a "process manager" that provides a point and click 
interface to the tubes and their recipes. As before, the
XP host serves as recipe and log library, with the process
controls being handled autonomously by the tube controller
once a recipe is downloaded and started.

At this writing the login to XP is "Installer" with
password "Installer". The GMI Cell Manager autoruns
on login.


On startup, the system comes up in a "look but don't touch"
mode. To make changes it's necessary to log in to the system.

To log in, right-click on the little ICCI icon on the right
side of the Start bar to bring up a login/logout dialog box.
At present, the logins and passwords are identical, so use
Eng for the login and Eng for the password. 

In the GMI Cell Manager window, icons representing the three
existing tubes are presented. Clicking on one of them brings
up the process manager to look at that tube. Somewhat unhelpfully,
if you do that when the process manager is already running, it
makes you go back and find the original icon. You can either
kill it, or use View>Select Tube to change tubes.

The process manager window has two panes, Gases and Temps.
It should be noted that two sets of temperature measurements
are taken, Profile and regular, at each of three locations.
The Profile measurements are taken inside the tubes and are
close to the wafer temperatures. The other measurements are
taken in the heater wall (sometimes called "spike" thermocouples)
and are used for control the heaters. This scheme helps to
limit temperature extremes in the heating elements. However,
the temperatures set in the recipe are _not_ experienced by
the wafers. Instead, a table is built up (called "profiling"
the tube) in which the setpoint required to achieve a specific
profile TC temperatures is recorded. That becomes part of a
"temperature table" which is used to look up the spike temp
needed to get a desired wafer temperature.


Brief operation

Typically the user will encounter the system with the cell
manager and process manager running with an idle recipe 
loaded and running for each tube.

Start by bringing the Process Manager-Supervisor window to
the foreground. The displayed tube name and number are in the
upper left corner of the window.To look at a different tube
click on View>Select Tube, scroll and highlight the desired
tube in the dialog box and click OK. Alternatively, one can
kill the process manager and click on the desired tube in the
Cell Manager. 

Once the desired tube is being displayed, look at the Gases
and Temps panes to verify things are ok. Next, it's time to
load the desired recipe.Begin by selecting Start/Abort> Stop
Recipe.The tube Status changes to "Waiting for Start Switch"
but no other changes occur; in particular, temperatures are
maintained at setpoint.

Next, select Send>Recipe to open a recipe Select menu. Scroll
down and highlight the desired recipe, then click OK. Next a
parameter setting dialog box will open, usually containing 
things like step times. Set the desired values and click OK.
A popup dialog box opens and announces either success or an
error message. On success step zero is loaded and executed,
which in some recipes pulls the boat out immediately.

Place your wafers on the boat, pressing the Start/Ack button
(white) on the furnace panel will cause the recipe to begin
running. One can also use the Start/Abort>Start Recipe menu.
It's also possible to just hit F5, as in the old system.