SEMI, Partners Receive $5M for eDiagnostic Security Development

Electronic News, Oct 22, 2001

THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY (NIST) recently awarded Semiconductor Equipment Materials International (SEMI) $5 million through NIST's Advanced Technology Program (ATP) to develop, prototype and validate a security framework for electronic collaboration via the Internet. San Jose-based OEM and materials supplier consortium SEMI is serving as the project administrator for the $10.1 million project conducted as a joint-venture development partnership that includes Advanced Micro Devices, domainLogix, ILS Technology and Oceana Sensor Technologies.

The joint venture plans to create a security framework for electronic collaboration that will allow semiconductor manufacturers and equipment suppliers to share information while protecting proprietary information on both sides. The project team will validate its approach by building e-diagnostics and e-manufacturing applications, demonstrating that it resolves security problems and offers compelling improvements in factory effectiveness, and feed ing this direct experience back to improve the security framework, according to SEMI. The vendor-and party-neutral framework will be developed as an open standard. It will permit multiple parties to collaborate simultaneously on issues that involve complex interactions between multiple pieces of equipment, SEMI said.