Samsung spotlights sensor risks across HVAC and critical fab utility systems

At Ultrafacility 2025, Tony Syvarth, HVAC and Exhaust Manager at Samsung Austin, hosted a roundtable titled “Critical Sensor Strategies: Best known methods to manage risks and limitations of sensors to ensure uninterrupted system performance”.

Following the conference, Syvarth provided an overview of how the conversation unfolded.

What critical systems were discussed?

The conversation focused on dry air, compressors, cooling towers, chillers, and exhaust scrubbers. The Compressed Dry Air (CDA) System is the most critical as it affects wafer yield, removing any moisture from the air before the cleanroom.

Why is this a crucial conversation for the industry?

As semiconductor companies race to smaller node sizes, each manufacturing interruption risks larger financial impacts. Risk-based decision making associated with sensor resiliency, logic, calibration/maintenance risk, and financial impacts need to be very well understood, managed, and updated to match the changing business climate.

How did the roundtable discussion unfold?

There was a great mix of insights about sensing and education. I brought an exercise to spark the conversation, so people were supposed to review the system diagram and rank each sensor by their perceived risk, then list out the factors that made them rank them in that order. Many of the participants jumped straight in and reviewed and gave feedback, and others asked a lot of questions to familiarize themselves with the general systems and setups.

Were there any particularly interesting points raised by attendees?

Many who work in the operations/maintenance field were able to brainstorm some improvements. We received some feedback from vendors that we may want to consider self-diagnosing sensors in critical applications rather than the increased number of simpler sensors that we all have been trending towards.

What were the emerging themes, insights, or key learnings from the roundtable?

One of the major findings personally was that there was still a huge challenge in balancing risk versus effort. Some of the ideas were very cumbersome, such as creating a custom procedure for every single sensor at your site (there could be thousands), which would help reduce the risk, but at an enormous labor cost. A lot of the discussion was about how to make your riskiest systems robust enough that you could reduce the maintenance burden on all of them. Largely speaking though, there is a huge industry gap, and an opportunity for vendors to innovate so that sensors and instruments aren't causing impacts to our production lines. This is especially relevant in locations where the advanced node technologies are being produced in facilities that were originally designed for legacy technologies.

This was one of many insightful technical roundtable discussions at the conference. For further perspectives, see this session by Electrochemical (ECM):