Development of Three D.O.F Alignment Stage for Vacuum Environment

Alignment systems are frequently used under various semiconductor manufacturing environment. Particularly in PDP(Plasma Display Panel) manufacturing process, the alignment system is applied to the combining and sealing processes of the upper and lower glass panels of PDP, where these processes are performed in the vacuum chamber of high vacuum and high temperature. In this paper, the XYΘ-alignment stage is developed to align PDP panels. Because of high vacuum and high temperature environment, the alignment chamber has been designed to isolate the inner part of the alignment chamber from the outer environment of high vacuum and high temperature, in which every part of the alignment stage is inserted. As it is difficult to attach feedback sensors to the alignment stage in the alignment chamber, the alignment stage is implemented with the open loop algorithm, where the parallel link structure has been designed using step-motors and ball-screws for structural simplicity. The kinematic analysis is performed to drive the parallel link structure, based on the experiments of actuation-compensation of the alignment stage. For the error compensation, the hyperpatch model has been used to model the errors. From the experiments, the positional accuracy of the alignment stage can be improved significantly.