Pedro Reyero Santiago, Preston Ernst, Dominic Mayrhofer, VAT Vakuumventile AG, Haag, Switzerland
New processes and applications in the vacuum industry, especially in semiconductor manufacturing, require faster and more precise control of the conditions in the vacuum chamber. VAT has developed a new pressure control solution to optimize performance on each process individually by leveraging auto-learning and feed-forward control strategies. This is achieved by training VAT’s pressure control algorithms specifically on the actual process of interest, instead of using a universal control strategy. Through this new approach, it is possible to achieve better raw pressure control performance, resulting in higher process efficiency, as well as on-wafer performance improvements. Furthermore, it opens the door to new process innovation in vacuum manufacturing by enabling new process control strategies that are challenging to achieve with state-of-the-art pressure control technology, such as a stable control of highly dynamic pressure changes or maintaining a stable chamber pressure during fast gas pulses in Atomic Layer processing. Coupling these new control strategies with high-end control devices (sensors, drives, gas inlet systems, …) allows to push the performance to the system’s physical limits for each particular process. Lastly, VAT is targeting higher run-to-run process repeatability and improved chamber-to-chamber matching with this new pressure control solution.