Abstract

A universal recipe editor is for off-line viewing and editing of semiconductor-manufacturing recipes. The universal recipe editor can read recipes from a wide variety of semiconductor-manufacturing machines from different manufacturers using recipe distributed object model (R-DOM) files. An R-DOM file is generated for each kind of recipe-file format to locate process parameters within proprietary recipe-file formats. The sequence of parameters in the R-DOM file matches the sequence in the recipe data file so that parameters may be mapped from recipe data files for display and editing. ASCII or binary recipe file formats are mapped from the recipe data file using R-DOM objects. Revision and authoring information is kept in a recipe information file for each recipe. Each line of the recipe data file can specify a different process parameter. Security or access rights for each parameter is added for each parameter by including security codes on each line in the R-DOM file. A security system is queried before each parameter is updated to determine if the user has sufficient privilege to update that parameter. Parameter-level security is thus provided for process recipes for a variety of semiconductor equipment. R-DOM files may contain other information not provided for by the recipe format, such as parameter-level functions and limits. User-defined validation functions that depend on multiple parameters can be executed as each parameter is edited