The semiconductor industry is a higher value-added business. And the semiconductor manufacturing techniques are required high technological prowess. Now the techniques come at dozens nanometer units. Among other semiconductor manufacturing equipments, mask aligner is a one of the most important equipment. It makes mask to align on the wafer surface precisely. It must have three degree of freedom, one translation and two rotation motion. And it’s precision is dozens nanometer units. In these days, there are many precision mask aligner. The majority of them have a horizontal framework type. It means that mask and wafer are parallel with ground. Those types have the merit of simple construction and stabilities. But recently they reach uppermost limit. That is the gravity. As time went on, the mask and wafer were getting bigger. And their precision rates were getting more important. But gravity makes mask to warp. Consequently it is impossible to manufacturing ultra precision semiconductor.
Lately, because of these problems, their framework types are changed to perpendicular to ground. So the wafer and mask are vertical to ground, too. It overcomes a handicap of the horizontal type. There is not curved phenomenon at the mask surface. So It is possible to make a ultra-precision semiconductor. Therefore, in these days many semiconductor manufacturing corporations have researched this type equipment. But, up to present, they all work in the lab, and cannot be deployed on a commercial scale.
This thesis includes vertical type mask aligner stage system. Especially, It analysis 3-DOF (three degree of freedom) guide hinge. It is called Rotational symmetric leaf spring type hinge. In this thesis, it analysis 6-DOF stiffness of the hinge. And using this hinge and PZT amplification mechanism, it is designed total mask aligner stage system. The system performance is as follows. The controllable stroke of translation movement is more than 70 micrometer. The controllable stroke of the rotation motion is more than 0.5 milli-radian. And in the last, after optimal designing, it make an experiment on real total system. Also, it evaluated it’s performance.
