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Comment by neilpanchal | Hacker News Reader

I was involved in writing software for a small Fab and there is a big gap in the MES software space. If you want to start a new Fab, you need a manufacturing execution system (MES) to process wafers. This whole MES industry is ripe for innovation. For small Fabs, it’s not possible to afford MES-3000 from Applied Materials ~ multi-million $ license fees and it’s a beast of a system. I’ve had to deal with this ancient dog of a MES written in Coldfusion. Had several conversations with coworkers - “Wonder what the market is like for modern SaaS MES”. It’s a complex problem if you want to auto load recipes and control equipment with SECS/GEM, implement PCS, and run a Fab in the manner like Intel. This is one of the problems with scaling the Fab. Think automotive factory scaling but with expensive precision equipment and garbage software ecosystem.

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SaaS is too unstable for semiconductor manufacturers to rely on. They would want a locally-installed, stable X.Y.Z implementation.

This. "Copy Exactly" is not compatible with SaaS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_Exactly

Well, it would be a typical enterprise installation. Presumably on-prem or some hybrid.

At that point how is it differentiated from the incumbent product?

If you are running a serious fab you already have AMAT equipment anyway and there's probably good reasons to get the industry standard AMAT MES software.

Realistically, this software will probably continue not to exist because there are not many target customers in this "mini-fab" segment, and they are uniformly poor. That's not a great outlook for sales. If your software is any good, you want to market to the same segment AMAT does and go for the multi-million $ licensing fees.

Then what makes it a service? It would be unwieldy to bring in consultants... unless they can take over for the extant fab techs as soon as they arrive. Any downtime in the fab is millions lost.

There are a few options for smaller fabs. There's SiView from IBM, a few products from Inficon which can handle much of an MES's capabilities and some others:

[1] https://www.ibm.com/products/siview [2] https://ims.inficon.com/ [3] https://kontron-ais.com/en/products/factory-automation/fabea... [4] https://www.peergroup.com/expertise/factories/factory-automa...

I'd bet there is a reasonable market for a good SAAS MES, or at least parts of a total solution. I imagine that you would want at last part of the solution to be on-prem, to avoid shuttling the large amounts of data that process tools are producing offsite.

curious whether you've seen Oqton? https://www.oqton.com/

Do you have any references where someone could learn more about this?

They might not be able to share more given NDAs and such.

You can read the SEMI standards. All of this is thoroughly standardized to allow interoperability between equipment from different suppliers.

SECS (SEMI Equipment Communications Standard) and GEM (Generic Model for Communications and Control of Manufacturing Equipment) will be of particular interest.

https://www.semi.org/en/industry-groups/smart-manufacturing/...

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