WAFER HANDLING APPARATUS AND METHOD

摘要

A high-speed wafer-processing apparatus and method that employs a vacuum chamber having at least two wafer transport robots and a process station. The vacuum chamber interfaces with a number of single-wafer load locks that are loaded and unloaded one wafer at a time by a robot in atmosphere. Four load locks are sized to allow for a gentle vacuum cycling of each wafer without significant pumpdown delays. The robots in the vacuum chamber move wafers sequentially from one of the load locks to a process station for processing and then to another one of the load locks for unloading by the atmospheric robot.