Tokyo Electron Kabushiki Kaisha

Tokyo Electron Tohoku Kabushiki Kaisha

Tsutomu Haraoka

Ken Nakao

Reiji Niino

Makoto Kobayashi

Shingo Watanabe

Hiroyuki Iwai

Tetsu Ohsawa

Yoshiyuki Fujita

Hisashi Kikuchi

Naoya Kaneda

Hiroshi Kumada

Hiroaki Ikegawa

Tomoyuki Ohbu

Keiji Takano

A heat treatment device including a handling chamber that has a carriers feed in/out opening for carriers holding plural sheets of objects to be treated parallelly vertical, a vertical heat treatment furnace for heat treating the objects and a posture changer for swinging the carriers near the carriers feed in/out opening of the handling chamber on a rotational center into a territory of lower sides of the carriers to change the posture of the objects to be treated from the vertical position to the horizontal position. The heat treatment device also has a carriers storage unit disposed above the posture changing means for storing a plural number of posture changed carriers, conveying device for conveying the carriers between the storage unit and the posture changing device and the heat treatment furnace side. Also, provided is a transferrer for transferring the objects-to-be-treated to/from an objects-to-be-treated holder for loading and unloading into/out of the heat treatment furnace side. The posture changer swings the carriers on the rotational center to sides of the carriers to change the carriers' posture from vertical to horizontal so the carriers have postures changed along a swing track of a minimum radius with small bulge amounts and a minimum moving amount. Thus, a conveying distance and a conveying time for conveying the posture changed carriers to the upper storage unit be reduced, and the heat treatment device can be smaller-sized and have improved processing efficiency.

Heat treatment method and device

In order to form a film on a surface of a semiconductor wafer, a multiplicity of wafers are individually mounted on ring-shaped mounts of a wafer boat, while the temperature within a reaction tube is set at, e.g., 400.degree. C. under a nitrogen gas atmosphere. After loading the wafer boat into the reaction tube, the temperature within the reaction tube is raised up to, e.g., 620.degree. C. at a rate of, e.g., 100.degree. C./min, and SiH.sub.4 gas is supplied onto the surface of a silicon substrate to form a polysilicon film. After film formation, air is forced to flow along the internal surface of the heating section to forcibly cool the interior of the reaction tube. In the case of forming a metal silicon film using a wafer having a silicon substrate and a metal film formed on the surface of the silicon substrate, the temperature within the reaction tube is set at, e.g. 100.degree. C. for loading the wafers. This suppresses the growth of a natural oxidation film and improves characteristics of a semiconductor device. The same principle may apply to an oxide film formation and an impurity dispersion.

Heat treatment process for wafers

Growing community of inventors

Sagamihara, Japan

Tsutomu Haraoka