EXCON: a graphics-based experiment-control manager
Mumit Khan, Paul Anderson, F. Cerrina · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1991
EXCON is a software package developed to control and define the modeling of experiments. In this case, EXCON is used to integrate various individual modeling systems, in a user- definable manner, to simulate the semiconductor manufacturing process. These numerous systems model specific aspects of the integrated circuit fabrication process. Each can be a large complex software program requiring many system resources to reliably emulate the physical processes, in many cases at the atomic level, in an analytical manner. There are many different program data formats and user interfaces within the modeling systems used. EXCON addresses the automatic insertion of configuration and process data, the conversion of data formats between modeling systems, and the sequence of model execution. EXCON also has a mechanism to re-run the sequence of models with variations in one or several configuration or data parameters, thereby creating an environment to do controlled experiments. EXCON assists in the visualization of the data in the experimental data sequence. EXCON allows for coarse-grained parallelism by connecting processes with an interprocess and inter-machine communication mechanism, thereby allowing for concurrent execution of processes on multiple machines. System performance enhancement is done with a incremental directed graph analysis technique. EXCON will, when appropriate, transparently convert file formats between modeling systems.