Temperature and Process Control in Rapid Thermal Processing

“The future of RTP depends (...) on improving temperature control (...) in RTP equipments” [1].”Implementation of single wafer RTP systems into microelectronics fabrication will require an improvement of the existing (...) control technology for these systems” [2]. Obviously these two citations have a very similar meaning. They both come from review papers presented at two international meetings. The only difference is that the first meeting was held in 1987, and the second in 1994. Obviously, process control for RTP is still an important issue. In the following, after a brief historical presentation, we will develop the background associated with RTP process control, together with the state-of-the-art. The specific issue of temperature measurement is presented in Chapter 3.