SEMI SECS/GEM

SECS/GEM is the standard almost nobody outside semiconductor manufacturing has heard of, and it has been quietly running machine-to-machine communication in fabs for over forty years. SEMI’s E4 (SECS-I), E5 (SECS-II), E30 (GEM) and E37 (HSMS) standards define how a piece of process equipment reports status, raises alarms, accepts recipes and streams process data to a factory host.

• A genuine M2M standard - Equipment from many vendors speaks one protocol to one host, which is exactly the interoperability problem APIs solve elsewhere.
• GEM defines the behaviour model - Not just a message format: what states equipment reports, which events it raises, and how a host controls it.
• HSMS moved it to TCP/IP - The original was RS-232; HSMS carries the same messages over sockets.
• Deeply adopted - Effectively universal in wafer fabrication, and a precondition of factory automation.

SECS/GEM belongs in any honest account of semiconductor interoperability, because it disproves the easy assumption that this industry does not do machine-to-machine integration. It does, extensively, and has for decades. What it does not do is expose any of it outside the factory. The protocol is designed for a host on the same plant network, not for a partner, a customer or an agent on the open web — which is the gap The State of Compute & Hardware APIs measures when it scores the silicon layer at 10.7.