Three dimensional temperature uniformity modeling of a rapid thermal processing chamber

A 3-dimensional model of an industry standard Rapid Thermal Processing (RTP) chamber (AG Assoc. 4108 Heatpulse) has been created. The chamber consists of a quartz sleeve containing a 200mm wafer surrounded by a polysilicon thermal guard ring. The wafer is heated by tungsten filament lamps which are assumed to radiate according to Boltzman's gray-body model. Detailed radiation transfer among ≈ 4000 finite surfaces is considered as well as Navier-Stokes solution of an energy balance to determine chamber temperature distributions. Experimental wafer temperature distributions have also been obtained using an 8 inch wafer imbedded with 17 thermocouples and from oxide growth measurements at 700 and 1100 Centigrade respectively. The model predictions are within 1% of the experimental data at both low and high temperatures with the only parameter being the lamp filament temperature. The model is used to demonstrate the ability to examine non-symmetric effects of varying specific chamber properties (i.e. lamp power output, wall reflectivity), as well as transient phenomena.