The array-control heater and non-uniform resistance module design for regulating the temperature profile in a reactor chamber

The process chamber is the core unit of chamber-category integrated circuit manufacturing equipment. The physical field distribution in the chamber directly determines the process quality, but flexible and refined regulation of the physical field is the severest difficulty the equipment design confronts. The actual process chamber is relatively rigid in general, and lacks enough degrees of freedom (DOF) to flexibly regulate the distribution of process factors. As a result, it is difficult to achieve refined regulation of the process quality of the large-area wafer. To solve this problem, a multi-DOF and flexible design concept for the spatial distribution of process factors was proposed, and based on this concept, two typical design solutions were presented. To solve this kind of high-DOF and physical field involved design problem, a generalized profile error feedback (PEF) method was established that employs an iterative-approximation mode and starts from an initial guessed model. Four operations, including error obtainment, weight matrix configuration, error distribution and compensation, are in each iteration step. This iterative loop is run to make the current physical field profile in the critical domain continuously approximate the expected profile. The two design solutions both achieved the flexible and refined regulation of the thermal field via the PEF method. And under the condition of model-based simulation, the PEF method drove the current temperature profile to approximate the expected one in the chamber, and found a design variables sequence to make the relative error reduce from 2.91~5.28% of the initial guessed model to 0.012~0.015%.