Thermal Behaviors of Control Modules for Semiconductor Manufacturing Equipment

Abstract

Semiconductor fabrication is one of the most complicated process in production industry with more than 700 complex processing steps. It, therefore, requires high-precision and high-speed control of stage for semiconductor manufacturing equipment. The growing of miniaturization and multifunctioning includes the dramatic increase of waste heat density in electronic packages in recent years. Thus, the performance and the reliability of the components, modules, and equipment are being more and more necessary. The issue in electronics thermal management is one of the key factors that affect on the degradation of performance and the reduction of component and module reliability. Consequently, the proper thermal management solution of control modules is required for accurate operation and acceptable reliability. There are a variety of cooling techniques ranging from the simplest and having lowest cost as natural convection air cooling to the more complicated such as phase change, thermoelectric, microjet cooling, and microchannel heat sink. Based on the complexity and the requirement of an electronic system, an appropriate thermal management solution is selected. The need of accurate thermal characteristic prediction is no exception. Due to the requirements of time and accuracy, simplicity and high precision are two achievements of the desirable approach. The research summarized in this thesis describes the possible solution for thermal management of electronic control modules of semiconductor manufacturing. The proposed thermal packaging is established by the combination of thermal interface materials (TIMs) and Copper heat slugs. The improvement of the control modules is also tightly constrained by the mechanical structure design adjustment. The following tasks were done to demonstrate the effectiveness of supposed given solutions. Firstly, the computational investigation was conducted with different conditions including natural convection, and forced convection for the initial modules design and the improved designs. The commercial CFD package ANSYS Icepak was employed to predict the temperature fields of control modules. Secondly, the theory of thermal resistance network analysis was conducted to confirm the results archived by numerical modeling. The thermal resistance model was stimulated in the similar condition to the computational simulation for the robust analysis. In addition, the parametric studies including effects of heat sink structural designs, air flow velocities, thermal interface material properties, and designs of PCB thermal vias were conducted in order to achieve the optimized thermal management solution for electronic control modules. The obtained thermal performances from numerical analysis and thermal resistance network modeling show that thermal packaging solution is a promising thermal management method for electronic control modules of semiconductor manufacturing. With the considerable reduction of the major components temperature, the random failures of control performances related to thermal issues may mitigate and the reliabilities of components, packages as well as modules will be improved.