SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Phase I project will explore control of vibrations for front-end semiconductor manufacturing equipment, where micron precision is required. This control is required at sub-Hertz (Hz) frequencies, where local seismic activity and disturbances in the manufacturing plant often cause vibrations of the supporting floor. Presently available vibration isolation tables are not effective below 1 Hz. A true multi-channel active feed-forward vibration controller is needed that minimizes the total positional error of manufacturing equipment being controlled. Phase I will investigate a new method called SFR-SVD, meaning signal-free reference using singular value decomposition, to provide effective vibration isolation at micron resolution and sub-Hertz frequencies. It is expected to reduce vibration by at least 20 decibels from 0.1 Hz to 100 Hz. Commercial application will be found in integrated circuit manufacturing facilities of the semiconductor industry. The cost of semiconductor foundry buildings may be significantly reduced.

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a new prototype multichannel controller for a six degree-of-freedom (DOF) vibration isolation table. The new table will mitigate vibration in advanced submicron line-width semiconductor production and metrology machinery. The controller will apply a new method for multi-channel active control to the active control of vibration. Available vibration control tables, while adequate for vibration control in today's semiconductor production and measuring equipment, will be inadequate for emerging semiconductor technology, in which six-DOF table vibration must be controlled to much lower levels of vibration. Existing six-DOF systems control each channel of motion independently on the unlikely assumption that, unless collocated, actuators and error sensors are decoupled from each other. As a result, existing tables tend to become unstable and to have limited vibration control performance. A new algorithm avoids these difficulties by permitting unified control of several channels of reference sensors and table motions. The new controller will extend signal separation technology that is now opertional in a multi-channel noise canceller. Commercial applications are expected in industries requiring a high degree of vibration isolation in sensitive electronics fabrication operations. In particular, operations in deep ultraviolet and X-ray lithography, semiconductor critical dimension and defect metrology, and atomic force and electron microscopy are targeted for this new vibration isolation technology..