Comparison of Run-to-Run Control Methods in Semiconductor Manufacturing Processes

Abstract

Run-to Run (RtR) control plays an important role in semiconductor manufacturing.In this paper, RtR control methods are generalized. The set-valued RtR controllers with ellipsoidapproximation are compared with other RtR controllers bysimulation according to the following criteria: A good RtR controller should be able to compensate for variousdisturbances, such as process drifts, process shifts (step disturbance)and model errors; moreover, it should beable to deal with limitations, bounds, cost requirement, multipletargets and time delays that are often encountered in realprocesses. Preliminary results show the good performance of the set-valued RtRcontroller. Furthermore, this paper shows that it is insufficient to uselinear models to approximate nonlinear processes and it is necessary to developnonlinear model based RtR controllers.