On the fab floor, thermal budget isn’t a guideline—it’s a hard boundary. One degree off in soft bake or hard bake, and the photoresist profile shifts. CD control drifts. Overlay error climbs. Pretty soon, the line isn’t sorting good die from scrap; it’s just sorting problems.
What actually matters under the hood
We run this RTP lamp on short-wave halogen heating through a quartz window assembly. Energy couples directly into the wafer, fast, with minimal thermal inertia. That gives us wafer-level uniformity held at ±0.1°C across the process window, and repeatability that stays inside run-to-run tolerance. The system is cleanroom-compatible down to Class 1–100, with zero particle generation—verified by in-situ monitoring and a sealed lamp/reflector path. Control is closed-loop, using calibrated pyrometry to hold setpoint stability even when batch loads change.
Why it stays honest in litho and beyond
This lamp is built around the thermal signatures that matter in lithography and the etch steps that follow. Soft bake and hard bake temperatures hold tight across the wafer, so photoresist flow, standing wave control, and critical dimension behavior stay predictable. The fast ramp cuts thermal soak time, which protects underlying films and keeps throughput moving. Power draw is optimized without compromising peak output, and the lamp module is rated for 24/7 operation without unplanned downtime. In practice, that translates to fewer rework lots, less scrap, and yield that doesn’t yo-yo.
What you need to plan for
The lamp drops into standard RTP tool platforms, but the quartz window and thermal budget have to be matched to chamber geometry and reflector design. Expect a short commissioning window to nail emissivity calibration and run uniformity mapping for your specific recipes. Once it’s tuned, the module runs like a set-and-forget thermal source—until the next scheduled PM.