This chapter describes an on-going collaborative research project between the University of Brighton and Applied Materials Ltd., a manufacturer of semiconductor process equipment. A robot manipulator places semiconductor wafers with extreme reliability within this equipment. Advances in semiconductor technology have prompted demands for even higher levels of reliability in the manipulator, but have also led to greater diversity in the physical properties of the wafers, posing great problems for the manipulators' sensing systems. A comprehensive survey of suitable sensing techniques has found vision to have the potential to overcome these problems, and a systemic approach to the implementation of machine vision is presented.
Intelligent sensing as a means to error free semiconductor wafer handling, Page 1 of 2
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