Research On Some Problems Of Wafer Handling Robot Based On EFEM Module

With the progress of technology, the development of electronic products is changing rapidly. It makes the integrated circuit (IC) industry reform constantly. Therefore, the main work unit in IC products——wafer’s processing and handling requires higher and higher. In the late1980s, the robot technology is introduced into the IC automation equipment technology.Its main task is wafer’s accurate positioning and fast and smoothly handling.The performance of the robot directly influence on the wafer production efficiency and manufacturing quality. So it has a profound meaning for study of the robots and its key technology.EFEM module is the transit hub in the whole process of semiconductor industry, and it is a kind of high levels of the environment clean equipment. It used to build the clean level silicon wafer storage environment and transmitted it to designated processing work station. In this paper, it mainly focuses on study of robot used in EFEM module.Firstly, it summarizes the research status at home and abroad about wafer handling robot, and the type of existing wafer handling robot. On this basis, it studies on the configuration design and model selection about wafer handling robot. According to the operation requirement and manufacturing cost of the robot used in EFEM module, it provides the performance comparison between planar joint typed robot and radial linear expansion robot. At last, the indirect driven planar joint typed robot which is low cost and high feasibility is chosen as wafer handling robot used in EFEM model.Then, it introduces the kinemaitcs basis about the robot path planning, analyzes the performance characteristics of redundancy freedom robot, gives the judge performance of robot, puts forward the general problem of the robot path planning and the method of path generation. In addition, it takes3-DOF plane robot used in2location EFEM module as the research object, studies on the first trajectory and does much trajectory simulation. Based on the extended Jacobian method, put forward a kind of path planning method which takes for flexibility as index. Through comparing, the robot got by the planning method based on the wrist point (the end of second joint) trajectory in Cartesian space is better.At last,the paper also does much structure optimization and finite element analysis of wafer handling robot’s key components, puts forward the optimum improvement plan about the rotation unit and the fuselage column unit, does much finite element analysis through the software SolidWorks Simulation, and gets the plans are all feasible.