Thermal modeling and control of rapid thermal processing systems

Rapid thermal processing (RTP) is becoming increasingly more important in semiconductor wafer fabrication. A nonlinear physical model for a generic RTP system is described. This generic RTP system is representative of the state-of-the-art RTP systems. A low-order nonlinear model is developed. A model-based LQG controller is designed for the low-order model which successfully controls the full-order nonlinear simulation model.