Decentralized control of wafer temperature for multizone rapid thermal processing systems

Decentralized control is shown through analysis and experimentation to be an appropriate strategy for wafer temperature control in certain multizone rapid thermal processing (RTP) systems. An input-output controllability analysis is conducted to illustrate that the direction associated with the reference command (set-point) corresponding to a spatially uniform temperature trajectory specification is nearly in alignment with the "most" controllable direction associated with the maximum singular value for a multiple concentric lamp configuration. Consequently, the control structure need not alter the directionality of the plant and, thus, can be achieved by a simple decentralized controller where the lamps are paired individually to sensors to achieve a multiloop structure where all interactions are not taken explicitly into account. This result is shown to produce acceptable performance even for an ill-conditioned plant since the directions corresponding to the smaller singular values are irrelevant to the uniform temperature control criteria. Moreover, straightforward nonmodel-based tuning of the controller is enabled due to the simplicity of the decentralized control structure.