Electric heating – Heating devices – Combined with container – enclosure – or support for material...
Utility Patent
1999-07-12
2001-01-02
Walberg, Teresa (Department: 3742)
Electric heating
Heating devices
Combined with container, enclosure, or support for material...
C219S411000, C219S494000, C374S129000
Utility Patent
active
06169271
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
Typical thermal process (TP) systems involve placing semiconductor wafers in a hot-walled environment to heat them and maintain their equilibrium temperature at or above about 400° C., so as to produce annealing or other thermally induced processes. In such thermal processing it may be important to precisely control the temperature at which the wafer is processed so that the resulting material properties are within as narrow a range about the desired values as possible. This is especially true in the latest semiconductor manufacturing processes where ion implantation anneals must achieve very precisely controlled diffusion depth for dopants, or for metallization annealing in which precise metal-silicide phase formation is critical to material processes.
However, in such systems precise measurement of the wafer or work piece temperature can be very difficult. This is due to the fact that the wafer temperature is rarely equal to the temperature of any of the surfaces which are in radiant or conductive thermal contact with it. Additionally, direct measurement of the wafer temperature is not easy because contact with the wafer by a temperature probe such as a thermocouple is very likely to contaminate the wafer and the use of optical pyrometry usually requires a precise knowledge of the emissivity of the wafer, which can vary with changes in temperature as well as the properties of any coatings or layers which may have been deposited on the surface. There are methods in which a highly reflective surface is used to avoid emissivity dependence or in which the emissivity of the wafer surface is measured, but these are difficult or expensive to implement in a processing system for volume production.
For example, one method for pyrometer-based temperature measurement which is insensitive to the emissivity of the wafer uses a highly reflective mirror surface adjacent to the wafer to function. This has practical difficulties because such a mirror needs to be non-contaminating of the wafer with metals and other impurity elements. This can be difficult to guarantee while using the usual reflective materials such as metals. Multi-layer refractive materials may also be used as mirrors but may not work well across the range of wavelengths covering the peak in the Planck radiation distribution and therefore may not be very efficient mirrors for thermal radiation, and may be subject to substantial heat absorption. They may also become clouded by condensates or reactions with process gases or degraded by high temperature.
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Daviet Jean-François
Hammond Martin L.
M{umlaut over (u)}eller Robert
Savas Stephen E.
Fuqua Shawntina T.
Mattson Technology Inc.
Walberg Teresa
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
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