Two chemical engineering professors at The University of Texas at Austin won awards from the International Federation of Automatic Control, an organization that promotes the science and technology of automatic control.
Professors S. Joe Qin and Thomas F. Edgar both won best paper prizes for two articles in Control Engineering Practice, a journal archiving papers that illustrate the direct application of theory in automatic control technology.
Dr. Edgar's paper is, "Run-to-run control and performance monitoring of overlay in semiconductor manufacturing," which he wrote with C.A. Bode, B.S. Ko, both university graduates when they worked with Edgar. The researchers studied wafer fabrication at Advanced Micro Devices and tested the application of controller performance monitoring (CPM) theory, in which computers assess the quality of production by processing data from automated devices used in semiconductor fabrication. Engineers can then use "run-to-run control," in which they create one "run" of chips, assess the quality, and then make improvements to the next "run." Using these control techniques allowed an increased yield of chips that were of a higher quality, Edgar said.
"These ideas can really be applied in a broad range of applications," said Edgar, who holds the George T. and Gladys H. Abell Chair in Engineering.
Dr. Qin, the Paul D. and Betty Robertson Meek and American Petrofina Foundation Centennial Professor in Chemical Engineering, studies the control and operations of chemical and industrial plants to discover ways to optimize their efficiency using optimization and control theory. He has worked at the university since 1995, and won the award for the paper, "A survey of industrial model predictive control technology." It was the result of a survey that Dr. Qin and co-author Thomas Badgwell conducted on eight industrial companies. They studied the international companies' commercially available forms of "model predictive control," a technology used to optimize the efficiency of chemical and industrial plant operations.
The paper is significant because information about the technology wasn't available outside the industries before, but Qin's work unified different methods, applied model predictive control theory to them, and made the information available to the general public.
"We had a pretty good idea about how big a contribution this would be before submitting it to the journal," Qin said.
Over a three-year period, every article in Control Engineering Practice, which is published monthly, is a candidate for the best paper award, said Michael Masten, who will chair the committee that selects the best papers in 2008. But only three articles won the award in July.
"It is a significant honor," Masten said.
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