Wafer loading into calottes
Multiple products, especially in MEMS and sensor fabrication, are still fabricated on 100 mm to 200 mm substrates with processing equipment that are designed for manual loading. Mainly, PVD systems use calottes in combination with process rings to increase uniformity and decrease defect levels. Automated loading of wafers into calotte segments is generally challenging, since calottes are spherical surfaces with very loose specifications in terms of hand-off positions.
mechatronic has developed a loading system in a standalone configuration to address this need. Hand-off positions are measured and fed back into the robot for each loading step.