Unified Controller Design for Intelligent Manufacturing Automation

摘要

The proposed objective was to develop a unified controller design methodology formanufacturing automation systems and to demonstrate the approach on a manufacturing process of interest to DARPA. The demonstration system selected was rapid thermal processing (RTP) of semiconductor wafers. This novel approach in integrated circuit manufacturing demands fast tracking control laws that achieve near uniform spatial temperature distributions. In order to ensure the final product quality, it is essential to maintain a uniform temperature profile despite uncertainties in both transient and steady state phases of the process. Specific accomplishments included the development of mathematical and computational tools for heat transfer modeling, specifically conduction and multiband radiation, nonlinear model reduction, methods for robust thermal control, and an approach applicable to repetitive run-to-run feed forward learning control. All the results were tested for feasibility on commercial RTP chambers.