Adomaitis, Raymond A.A model of a three-zone Rapid Thermal Chemical Vapor Deposition (RTCVD) system is developed to study the effects of spatial wafer temperature patterns and gas-phase reactant depletion on polysilicon deposition uniformity. A sequence of simulated runs is performed, varying the lamp power profiles so that different temperature modes are excited. The dominant spatial wafer thermal modes are extracted via proper orthogonal decomposition. A collocation formulation of Galerkin's method is used to discretize the original modeling equations, giving a low-order model which loses little of the original's fidelity. We make use of the excellent predictive capabilities of the reduced model in a real-time RTP system simulator.en-USmathematical modelingsimulationsignal processingdistributed parameter systemsIntelligent Control SystemsTechnical Report