Integrated bake/chill system for across-wafer temperature uniformity control in photoresist processing

Abstract

An integrated bake/chill thermal processing module is developed and experimentally evaluated to achieve spatial temperature uniformity of a silicon wafer throughout the entire processing temperature cycle of ramp, hold, and quench in lithography. The module uses a set of thermoelectric devices which are used to provide distributed heating and cooling to the substrate for uniformity and transient temperature control. The experimental results demonstrate that the wafer spatial temperature uniformity is within ±0.3 and ±0.1°C during transient and steady-state thermal processing, respectively.