Abstract
Manufacturing Execution System (MES) is the key point for semiconductor industry to enhance their competiveness, however, current system still relies on manual operation. Nowadays, it still leaves large room for semiconductor wafer manufacturer to improve the interface of MES. The existing system interface contained many drawbacks including irregular display content, complicated procedure, inconsistent design, as well as incomplete information feedback, which would produce negative factors inclusive of the following issues: manual handling mistakes by operators easily, increase of memory size, prolonging of operation time, and rise of psychological pressure. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to improve the MES interface. This study would improve the operation interface of MES for semiconductor from the perspective of human-machine interface design. In addition to gather current samples of MES operational interface used in the industry and arrangement of reference documents regarding interface design, the research also engages in developing revised MES operation interface considering both theory and practice, and eventually implement it in the case study of a company. The experiments were divided into 5 phases. Phase 1 was to analyze questions, list out current working procedures of MES interface for the case study, and record every time spent in the operation as well as the accuracy so as to provide performance comparison of interface design before and after the improvement. Phase 2 covered system planning, which proceeds analysis of advantage and disadvantage in current MES interface of case study as well as the way to present interface information, as aimed to improve the flaw and keep original merits while designing new interface. Phase 3 was to design user interface based on reference documents and 8 golden rules of interface design, as was achieved by software Visual Basic. Phase 4 and phase 5 were program coding and system verification in terms of time and accuracy.Based on the results of this study, re-design of operational interface and exertion of 8 golden rules indeed had obvious benefits to the operators in the production no matter in the operation time or the accuracy.