Robust control of rapid thermal processes applied to vapor deposition processing

Rapid thermal processes are an essential part of vapor deposition processing, which is widely used in semiconductor production; quality of the produced semiconductors significantly depends on accuracy of temperature control in an epitaxy process. From control point of view, temperature control is a nonlinear control problem. In the paper a control law for a family of nonlinear systems with polynomial nonlinearity is proposed and proved to provide asymptotic stability. The proposed control law is applied to a rapid thermal process control problem; experimental results for a vapor deposition processing are presented and illustrate a good tracking performance.