MULTIPLE INTERFACE DOOR FOR WAFER STORAGE AND HANDLING CONTAINER

摘要

The present invention is an improved container and interface for transporting or otherwise handling contamination-sensitive materials, such as semi-conductor wafers during processing. The container of the present invention employs a door-within-a-door design, allowing the container to connect with different interfaces on a single side. Employing a container of the present invention, manufactures may connect a single container to different tools or mini-environments employing incompatible interfaces without the need to use different containers or to access the contents of a single container from different directions. The present invention is particularly useful in instances where a single interface standard, e.g., SEMI Standard SMIF interfaces, has not been uniformly adopted in a facility. The present invention also provides means which allow either a cassette container or a cassette to be directly placed on an indexer and subsequent indexing to the correct location. This is also useful in instances where a facility has not uniformly adopted SMIF technology, and requires the flexibility to load both cassettes and SMIF containers on the same tool.