Leakage Analysis of Air Bearing for Vacuum Environment

진공환경용 공기베어링의 Leakage 해석

A vacuum environment is very important for NGL(Next Generation Lithography) apparatuses such as EUVL(Extreme Ultra Violet Lithography) or EPL(Electron Projection Lithography) and so on. The performance of these systems is dominated by vacuum level of processing and positioning accuracy of a stage. So, ultra-precision stage usable in a high vacuum level is needed for the improved performance of these devices. In contrast to atmospheric condition, a special attention must be paid to guide bearing, actuator and other elements. In this paper, air bearing is adopted because of its very high motional accuracy. So, air bearing is designed to be vacuum compatible using differential exhaust method, which prevents air from entering into vacuum chamber. For this, leakage analysis is performed theoretically and verified from experiment.