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Pandemic accelerates ASML’s adoption of AR Travel restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic opened a door for ASML that had been firmly closed: using augmented reality to troubleshoot complex issues at customers’ fabs remotely. Now the company sees plenty more opportunities to take advantage of the emerging technology across the entire organization. Paul van Gerven
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bout three months ago, an ASML team installing an EUV scanner in a Taiwanese fab ran into trouble. There was a pressure problem they couldn’t wrap their heads around. Normally, this means an expert is flown in posthaste. However, with corona quarantine measures in place, it would take him at least two weeks before he could get to work, seriously jeopardizing the customer’s production planning. To save the day, a local engineer put on a pair of hastily couriered Microsoft Hololens 2 mixedreality smart glasses (see sidebar), allowing the expert in San Diego to get a view on what the engineer was seeing and guide him through the right steps to fix the problem. It wasn’t as easy as that, of course. Though ASML had been experimenting with virtual and augmented reality technology for a while, it wasn’t quite prepared to perform a remote assistance operation like that. Why would it be? The thought had been entertained more than once, but the 22
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time was never invested because there was no way customers would allow it. Taking a camera to the heart of an IC manufacturing operation? Unthinkable. Until the coronavirus reared its ugly head, that is. Faced with installation delays and idle scanners, chipmakers quickly set aside their objections. In fact, one of them suggested the option, says Peter Peusens, director of ASML’s DUV Customer Support operations. “Not long after travel restrictions were put in place, someone working at a major customer of ours sent a Youtube video
The Hololens 2
about the Hololens to our service team. That e-mail ended up on my desk, with the request to see if I could look into it.” And so started a frantic operation across the organization to add augmented reality and related technologies to the toolkit of ASML Customer Support. After several successful service actions, hopes are high that they will be a permanent addition. “Over the past few months, we’ve been making more progress in this area than we have over the past few years. We’ll work very hard to expand on that, even when corona restrictions
Microsoft’s Hololens 2 is a mixed-reality headset developed for industrial applications. Its base functionality is live streaming of whatever the wearer is looking at. Viewers can add information to the wearer’s view, ranging from drawing a simple arrow to draw attention to a specific item, to projecting animations that show how to perform a certain action. In the future, real-time data may also be visible in the lens, for example showing the pressure value of a subsystem.
