Zoned infrared heating module

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:11:50 +0800

On the fab floor, you know the drill: a 0.2°C drift in bake temperature and your photoresist profile goes from within spec to scrap. Conventional hotplates fight edge roll-off and across-wafer non-uniformity, forcing you to tighten control limits and chase excursions. We built the zoned infrared heating module to take that variability out of soft bake and hard bake where it counts—right at the wafer. What matters under the hood Short-wave infrared with independent, closed-loop zone control delivers wafer-level uniformity of ±0.1°C at the resist surface. Temperature settles in seconds, so thermal ramp time drops and you get tighter process windows. It runs in Class 1–100 cleanrooms with zero particle generation, confirmed by in-situ monitoring and a low-outgassing design. The uptime is 24/7, with MTBF that lines up with the expectations we all have for semiconductor equipment. Why it works in lithography is simple: bake repeatability drives CD control and yield. With zoned heating, you cut thermal budget variability, so soft bake and hard bake stay consistent across lots, wafers, and shifts. That means fewer reworks, less scrap, and critical dimension performance that stays put. Energy use drops, too, because the module heats only the target zones and keeps thermal coupling into adjacent tools to a minimum. Installation needs a clean, flat mounting surface and enough clearance for the IR emitter array. Retrofit kits fit common tracks, but mechanical envelopes vary by platform. To hit the ±0.1°C uniformity, the module has to be calibrated to your resist thermal profile—we provide a traceable procedure for that. Once it’s set, the process stays locked, but if you change resist chemistry, plan on a re-qualification run.

Zoned on Factory Direct Infrared Heating

Zoned infrared heating module