On the fab floor, the photoresist bake isn’t just another step. It’s the gate. One temperature excursion, one particle event, and you can lose a lot of wafers. We built a quartz glass shield for fab lamps to keep that gate closed, shift after shift.
What matters under the hood
It’s high-purity fused quartz, chosen for stable transmission in short-wave and medium-wave IR, and for staying quiet—low outgassing—in cleanroom air. The shield keeps lamp output steady while protecting the filament and optics from coating drift and particulates. Across the wafer, thermal uniformity stays tight, so your soft bake and hard bake windows hold, with repeatable profile control. It runs in Class 1–100 environments without adding to particle count, and the design handles rapid thermal cycling without micro-cracking.
Why it sticks in a 7×24 lithography cell
Unplanned lamp stops murder schedule predictability and scrap yield you fought for. This shield takes out one of the top failure modes. The payoff: no unplanned downtime, lamp life that stretches, and bake temperature repeatability that stays in spec, run after run. Fewer lamp swaps. Stable critical dimensions. And a lower cost per wafer. You also save energy, because the shield keeps coupling efficiency up and thermal loss down.
The details that keep it honest
Installation has to match lamp-and-reflector geometry exactly. Even a few millimeters off can create hot spots and kill uniformity. Before you retrofit, verify connector type, lamp envelope dimensions, and cooling airflow. Treat the quartz surface with respect—wipe only with cleanroom-approved tools and solvents. Scratches scatter light and degrade uniformity fast. When it’s matched to the right lamp and process, the shield runs continuously with no scheduled replacement, just routine cleanliness checks.