This Standard was technically approved by the Physical Interfaces & Carriers Global Technical Committee. This edition was approved for publication by the global Audits and Reviews Subcommittee on December 8, 1216. Available at www.semiviews.org and www.semi.org in April 2017; originally published in 1991; previously published January 2017.

Note: This Standard has been purposely restricted to 100 mm (4 in.), 125 mm (5 in.), and 150 mm (6 in.) versions of the SMIF port. This has been done to establish a base for SMIF port standardization. Aspects of the 200 mm (8 in.) version have been negotiated by interested parties and published as SEMI E19.4.

A standard interface is required for containers intended to control the transport environment of cassettes containing wafers or disks. The interface must address the proper container orientation for material transfer and maintain continuity between the container and equipment environment in order to control particulate matter.

This Specification describes one approach to interfacing a clean cassette transport box to a clean environmental housing on a piece of semiconductor processing equipment or to other clean environments. The system concept involves mating a door on a cassette container to a door on an equipment canopy and transferring the cassette into, and out of, the equipment without exposing the cassette and wafers to outside contamination.