Power management system for a semiconductor processing facility

DETAILED DESCRIPTION According to the principles of this invention, semiconductor processing tools in a semiconductor processing facility are coupled to communicate with a power management system.
The power management system monitors the power consumption status, i.
e, a power consumption state, of each of the semiconductor processing tools.
Using the power consumption status of each of the semiconductor processing tools obtained through the monitoring operations, the power management system stages the operation of the semiconductor processing tools so as to maintain the power consumption of the semiconductor processing facility below a predefined maximum power consumption.
Limiting the power consumption to less than the predefined maximum power consumption reduces the per die processing costs without incurring the expense of building a new semiconductor processing facility or without modifying the semiconductor processing tools for larger batch sizes or for greater throughput.
Also, the automatic staging of the operation of the semiconductor processing tools based upon predefined power consumption requirements does not affect the basic semiconductor processing cycle and so does not affect the quality of the substrates produced in the semiconductor processing facility.
A power manager, a computer process, in the power management system is initialized to define semiconductor processing tools subject to power management and to specify the maximum power consumption for the semiconductor processing facility.
After the initialization, the power manager polls, e.
g.
, monitors, the semiconductor processing tools to obtain a tool mode, e.
g, a predefined power consumption state, of each to the tools.
When as a result of the monitoring operation, the power manager detects a high power consumption tool mode for a semiconductor processing tool as well as the tool mode for each of the other semiconductor processing tools.
Upon detection of the high power consumption tool mode for a semiconductor processing tool, the power manager determines whether that semiconductor processing tool is enabled for high power consumption, e