On the wafer floor, thermal drift during photoresist processing isn’t some academic concern—it will eat your line yield. A 2°C swing at soft bake can tilt the whole photoresist profile, and you’ll see CD variation and scumming show up fast. We built our infrared lamps for semiconductor work, and they deliver repeatable heat exactly where it needs to be.
What matters, technically
We lean on short-wave infrared (IR) with fast response and tight thermal control. Across the bake surface, we target wafer-level uniformity of ±0.1°C, and temperature repeatability holds steady cycle after cycle. The system runs in Class 1–100 cleanrooms without adding particles, so defect counts stay down. Output stability is tracked over 5,000+ hours with minimal lumen drop. This isn’t about hitting a peak—it’s about sitting on the setpoint, cleanly, inside the thermal budget of advanced photoresists.
Why it works in lithography
Soft bake is where you drive off solvents and lock in photoresist thickness. Hard bake is what locks the pattern before etch. Our IR approach heats only the target area, so warm-up and cool-down delays shrink, and it stays compatible with cleanroom operation. The payoff is fewer reworks, stable CD control, and line-width performance you can count on. Energy use drops because the heat goes straight in, with far less wasted. When the bake profile is consistent, the process window opens up, and scrap falls when the thermal profile actually matches the recipe.
Here’s what you need to plan for
The lamps need a dedicated, stable power bus and proper thermal management at the tool interface. Commissioning is short, but you still need to align the beam profile with the hotplate geometry. The design keeps thermal drift in check, but ambient airflow changes can still nudge bake uniformity—so for the most sensitive layers, lock in a fixed airflow profile.