• Transactions of The Korea Fluid Power Systems Society
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.14-20
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• 2011

This study aims at aligning multiple wafers to reduce wafer handling time in wafer processes. We designed a multilevel structure for a prealigner which can handle multiple wafer simultaneously in a system. The system consists of gripping parts, kinematic parts, vacuum chucks, pneumatic units, hall sensors and a DSP controller. Aligning procedure has two steps: mechanical gripping and notch finding. In the first step, a wafer is aligned in XY directions using 4-point mechanical contact. The rotational error can be found by detecting a signal in a notch using hall sensors. A dual prealigner was designed for 300mm wafers and constructed for a performance test. The accuracy was monitored by checking the movement of a notch in a machine vision. The result shows that the dual prealigner has enough performance as commercial products.