Semiconductor equipment manufacturer uses PC control to provide modular and scalable solution for their family
of machines
ULTRA t Equipment Company is a manufacturer of processing equipment used in the semiconductor and microelectronics industries. Their equipment performs cleaning, chemical mixing and photoresist processing manufacturing of products such as semiconductor wafers and flat panel displays. Their customers include IBM, Hewlett Packard and Motorola. Machines range from simple stand alone units that are loaded and unloaded by an operator to fully automatic robotic systems arranged as groups or clusters of the stand alone machines.
All machines are not created equal
ULTRA t's previous control solutions did not use standardized components, since the price and performance requirements of their machines varied among applications. They are now standardizing all their machine controls on a PC-based control architecture, using Think & Do Software and I/O from Automationdirect.com hardware that provides them with a fully scalable control solution.
Modular PC-based control
Think & Do Software is a PC-based control package that offers flowchart logic, HMI, motion and serial communications. Think & Do allows a programmer to develop his complete program, and then select either a Windows NT based PC or a Windows CE platform as the target hardware. ULTRA t Equipment selected the WinPLC, a Windows CE-based embedded PC processor which resides in a DirectLOGIC 205 PLC rack. The WinPLC provides backplane communication to I/O, onboard Ethernet and serial ports, and supports standard Windows communication tools such as DCOM and OPC. Through the Ethernet port, the WinPLC can communicate to both other WinPLC controllers, or to an NT-based master station. The WinPLC allowed ULTRA t to implement their low end control solution at a competitive price while keeping the same software and programming environment for their larger Windows NT based systems.
John Flaagan, ULTRA t Equipment President comments:
"Our previous control solutions used PLCs at the low end, and sophisticated motion control at the top end. Because of the limitations of the control systems and pricing, there was no consistency in the controls on our product line. By switching to PC-based control and using Think & Do Software at both the Windows NT level and Windows CE level, we now have a common control platform across our entire product line. The WinPLC allows us to use much of the same flowchart logic on a small manual machine that we use on our more sophisticated machines. We even have the option of moving to a distributed control architecture with a Window NT based master station and Windows CE based distributed control. As a machinery builder, we often have to customize our machinery to meet special application needs. With common software for the NT and CE platforms, we now have the ideal control solution."
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