This Standard was technically approved by the global
Photovoltaic – Automation Technical Committee. This edition was approved for
publication by the global Audits and Reviews Subcommittee on August 30, 2012.
Available at www.semiviews.org and www.semi.org in October 2012.
The purpose of this Standard is to provide a
specification for communication between adjacent equipment in material flow
(hereinafter referred to as horizontal communication [HC]) to be used for
photovoltaic fabrication system or similar ones (equipment here includes process
equipment, metrology equipment, transport equipment and clustered one of those,
etc.).
The purpose of this Standard is also to provide HC to
perform both "Material and associated data transfer" and "General purpose data
exchange" without factory host assistance.
The purpose of this Standard is also to provide HC
specification to cover the following cases based on a common concept.
Various material transfer types (such as Single
Substrate and Multiple Substrate with/without Carrier). Various material flow
type combinations (such as Uni-Direction, Alternate-Direction, Bi-Direction and
multiple set and/or combination of them).
The purpose of this Standard is also to provide HC
specification that is compatible with various line connection topologies (such
as Branch and Merge).
The purpose of this Standard is also to provide
scalable specification to support sufficient HC functionality for lower
implementation cost.