Design And Trajectory Planning Of Wafer Handling Robot

Integrated Circuit (IC) manufacturing has become the basis of world economy and IC equipments are the indispensable support of IC manufacturing. Wafer handling robot is one of the core technologies in IC equipments, which execute the key tasks: location and handling wafers in wafers fabrication. As the important component, wafer handling robots affect production efficiency and manufacturing quality of wafers, and show the automation and reliability of the total processing system. So the research of wafer handling robot is of a great significance to the development of IC manufacturing.With respect to the wafer handling robot, based on the survey of development and present research situation, the robot congfigurations are studied and compared, and the R-θis adopted. According to the movement characteristics of wafer handling robot arms(radial linear stretching), choose belt transmission precise linear guiding linkage mechanisms as the basic model. The arms and end-effector structures, which use two correlative planetary gear trains and linkage mechanisms for realizing the radial linear stretching movement of end-effector, are designed in detail. Then the kinematics analysis and dynamics analysis of the radial linear stretching component are discussed.The designs of single-arm and dual-arm wafer handling robots are completed, and the dual-arm robot is based on the single-arm robot. The transmission mechanisms of R movement (radial linear stretching) andθ(rotation) movement and Z (up-down) movement are designed, harmonic gear reducers are adopted on R andθtransmission mechanisms, ball screw is used for realizing Z movement, and the R,θ, Z movements are driven by independent AC servo motors. In order to improve clean level, the motors and gearing are fixed in the base and arms.Based on the working features of wafer handling robots, time-optimal trajectory planning of robot is researched deeply, and facing to special trajectory mechanical arm, time-optimal trajectory planning method, which considers the path limits, the velocity limits, and the acceleration limits, is proposed. Then the proposed method is applied to the design robot and the first arm velocity curve is obtained. The single-arm wafer-handling robot has been assembled, and the control system debugged. The dual-arm wafer-handling robot is processing. The tested results show that the single-arm wafer-handling robot can meet the practical requirement.