Improvement of zone control induction heating equipment for high-speed processing of semiconductor devices

In order to process a semiconductor device of high quality, uniform heating is necessary, but it is not easy to heat uniformly with conventional induction heating equipment. To solve this problem, zone control induction heating equipment has been jointly developed. In this paper, we examine the effect of dividing an induction heater into several small coil groups having different current and frequency, using the finite-element method. We describe the heating characteristics of the zone control coil groups and show that nearly uniform heating is possible by controlling both current and frequency.