For the duration of this internship, I joined team SkyNet, part of the System Infrastructure & Computer Systems (SICS) department, at ASML. My project is a proof of concept (POC) and the goal, is to discover what and how, thus integration was out of scope.
Currently, there are heavy hardware dependencies within SICS. Whatever new network configurations, installation scripts, or firmware need to be tested, a physical test bench (TB) has to be set up manually by the TBs’ LAB owner. Therefore, each team that wants to work on a TB, should book it in advance. There is a huge number of people who want to test and develop on them as of now, therefore, this leads to a scarcity of hardware and slows the process.
By setting up a virtualized test environment for SkyNet (in long-term SICS, but out of scope for this assignment), each team member will be able to quickly deploy the desired network components, they wish to develop, with ease and by themselves. The virtual environment solution will solve the problems with scarcity, which will increase the processing speed of developing, configuring, and maintaining the computer infrastructure of the lithography systems.
The goal of the project was to experiment with the deployment of the whole network that is within the lithography machine by using a few different methods to do so. After all methods were tested we looked back on the outcomes and compared each of the methods by also taking the requirements of the developers and the company into consideration to decide which method potentially contains the most feasibility.
We used Emulated Virtual Environment (EVE-NG) and VMWare’s ESXi hypervisor to build upon and test with. There was an integrated ESXi solution already in place upon my arrival in the company which was mostly used by other teams in the department (mostly for testing purposes). Therefore, I was granted access to that environment and that was one of the variants for deployment which feasability we tested throughout this project.
The second method we tested was to deploy an EVE-NG server on the ESXi and the third option was to deploy an EVE-NG server on bare metal at ASML’s lab.