Scaleable Service Oriented Distributed Architecture (SODA)

CenterPoint’s solutions are scaleable, able to grow with the number of applications, equipment units, volume of data or number of users. This is made possible by the service oriented architecture (SOA) which is at the core of all our products and solutions.

Central to this SOA or SODA are the CenterPoint Service Host (CPSH) and a set of off-the-shelf services. The CPSH is responsible for communication using multiple communication protocols (MS COM+, MS.net, SOAP, VFEI, self describing messages) and transports (TCP/IP, UDP,
TIBCO® , message queues), and for remote object communication.

The standard services are the platform for CenterPoint’s products (like APC\Platform and EDAfactoryController) and also the platform for any customer specific enhancement of these products. Therefore the full platform SDK is part of the delivered product.

Solutions are scaleable as they can be installed on a single or multiple distributed operating system platforms (which can be MS Windows 200x/XP, Linux, SunSolaris or HP UX).

An increase in the number of equipment units, users, applications or data might require more calculation power. Without any additional coding effort, an existing installation can be split from a single server to multiple servers thus distributing the workload.

In this way, solutions can be scaled up to become factory-wide fault-tolerant systems, seamlessly integrated with existing applications and perfectly adapted to the needs of the individual factory.

Overview of Off-the-Shelf Services

Naming
This service manages local and distributed services, especially their communication properties and current availability. This also covers the balancing of load and failover between equivalent services in the network. Any graphical user interface and any of the services running in the installed environment only have to access this service. They do not need to know about the locations and availability of all the other services. This makes CenterPoint’s installed products so easy to manage even at a factory-wide level.

Licensing
This service is responsible for monitoring the number of concurrent users and available equivalent services with respect to the license permission.

Auth&Auth
The authentication and authorization of users is carried out by this service. It especially covers the authorization of requests for any service in the environment. It is optionally possible to integrate this service with existing applications such as Microsoft Active Directory or the user management of an MES.

Transaction
A distributed service-oriented architecture requires the management of distributed transactions. This takes place here.

Business Objects
All the meta-data and configuration of the installed system is managed in this service. Products such as EDAfactoryController and APC\Platform are executed by this service. Centralized software upgrades for products and their user interfaces are also managed through this service. Custom applications can be implemented in the same way with immediate access to the whole service architecture simply by UML-design, code generation and applying the delivered Software Development Kit (SDK).

Model
This service executes any kind of diagnostics, statistical, monitoring or control model. Using the Software Development Kit (SDK) it is easy to integrate existing statistical applications or APC applications into these services and use them in the context of the APC\Platform or EDAfactoryController. A large number of models for semiconductor related statistics, data mining, pattern recognition and an expert-system framework are integrated with the delivered off-the-shelf models.

Interface B
The communication between EDAfactoryController and third-party applications such as MES, FDC, EES, etc. is provided by this interface service.

EDAClient
This service is responsible for the data acquisition from equipment units using the SEMI EDA standards.

Custom
With the help of the Software Development Kit (SDK) included in the product delivery it is possible to implement any custom service with all the features available to the standard services.