Position Control of Wafer Lift Pin for the Reduction of Wafer Slip in Semiconductor Process Chamber

Undetected wafer slip during the lift pin-down motion in semiconductor equipment may affect the center to edge variation, wafer warpage, and pattern misalignment in plasma equipment. Direct measuring of the amount of wafer slip inside the plasma process chamber is not feasible because of the hardware space limitation inside the plasma chamber. In this paper, we demonstrated a practice for the wafer lift pin-up and down motions with respect to the gear ratio, operating voltage, and pulse width modulation to maintain accurate wafer position using remote control linear servo motor with an experimentally designed chamber mockup. We noticed that the pin moving velocity and gear ratio are the most influencing parameters to be control, and the step-wised position control algorithm showed the most suitable for the reduction of wafer slip.