The manipulating robots recently performing the material handling in the semiconductor industry can be classified into three major categories: robots with up to 4 Degrees Of Freedom (DOF), working in cylindrical coordinates; universal articulated arms with 6 or more DOF; and hybrid parallel-series manipulators with 6 or more DOF combining together the motion characteristics of the cylindrical robots and of a special kind of closed-loop mechanisms, available in the industry since the early 1980s.
A Class of "Parallel-Serial" Manipulators and Their Application to Material Handling Automation
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Nowadays, the overall productivity of the semiconductor FABs is becoming more and more dependent on the performance of the robotic systems, responsible for material handling within the front-end and back-end mini-environments. Regardless of how long particular processes take, the time for exchanging an already processed wafer, with an unprocessed one, is always becoming a bottleneck in the urge to increase the performance of the processing machines.
High-Performance Wafer Handling Systems for Semiconductor Automation
PDF Format: 187 KB
