Gas flow patterns and thermal uniformity in rapid thermal processing equipment

Two-dimensional simulation of a rapid thermal processing (RTP) reactor is used to determine the radiative heating and the radiative and convective cooling. The gas flow patterns are found to be a strong function of temperature. Edge losses dominate the wafer thermal nonuniformity at high temperature, while convective cooling dominates at low temperature. A peak in the stress is found under transient conditions. To validate the model, some of the results are compared to experimental data from a small custom RTP system.<
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