A thermoelectricity-lamp based integrated bake/chill system for photoresist processing

The design of an integrated bake/chill module for photoresist processing in microlithography is presented, with emphasis on the spatial and temporal temperature uniformity of the substrate. The system consists of multiple radiant heating zones for heating the substrate, coupled with an array of thermoelectric devices (TEDs) which provide real-time dynamic and spatial control of the substrate temperature. The TEDs also provide active cooling for chilling the substrate to a temperature suitable for subsequent processing steps. The use of lamp for radiative heating also provide fast ramp-up and ramp-down rates during thermal cycling operations. The feasibility of the proposed approach is demonstrate via simulations based on first principle heat transfer modeling. The distributed nature of the design also means that a simple decentralized control scheme can be used to achieve tight spatial and temporal temperature uniformity specifications.