Semiconductor Manufacturing

RSF Elektronik has released the MS 15 optical kit style linear encoder with the most advanced features available in the smallest mechanical profile in the industry.

Linear motors have made irreversible inroads into highly dynamic applications such as manufacturing and measuring equipment in the semiconductor industry, in PCB assembly machines, textile machines and in automation.

Lithographic processing in the semiconductor industry requires aspherical lenses up to 500 mm in diameter, which permit extreme reduction. The requirements placed on grinding machines to manufacture these lenses have to be very stringent to attain faultless results in surface machining. The drives built into the grinding machines therefore have to be highly precise. Schüssler-Technik offers torque motors (Figure 1), that enable high-precision grinding of mineral lenses, partly thanks to their integrated HEIDENHAIN angle encoders.

Direct drives for open and closed-loop control require continuous real-time and exact information on the position of the slide. The accuracy, performance and reliability of the individual axes depend to a great degree on the linear measuring devices on the slides.

The trend in the semiconductor industry to ever higher levels of integration and, with it, to continuously finer structures, calls for measuring devices with high resolution for positioning to the nanometer in the manufacturing process and in measuring and inspection technology. Measuring error due to guideway influences and thermal expansion, which at present cannot be compensated by computation, can be ascertained by a new measuring device and therefore significantly reduced.