Vertical heat treatment apparatus and method of transferring substrates to be processed

Abstract

Disclosed herein is a vertical heat treatment apparatus which includes a thermal reactor having a reactor opening, a cover that hermetically closes the reactor opening, a holder that holds a large number of to-be-processed substrates via a ring-shaped support plate in such a manner as to arrange the substrates vertically at predetermined intervals, and an elevator mechanism that loads the holder into and unloads the holder from the thermal reactor. A transfer mechanism has a plurality of transfer plates that are arranged at predetermined intervals to carry to-be-processed substrates, and transfers the to-be-processed substrates between the storage container and the holder. The support plate is divided into an outer support plate and an inner support plate. The outer support plate has a cutout section through which the transfer plates can vertically pass to transfer the to-be-processed substrates. The inner support plate is placed at the inner periphery of the outer support plate and provided with a block section for blocking up the cutout section. Therefore, a plurality of to-be-processed substrates can be transferred at a time to the holder having the ring-shaped support plate. This makes it possible to reduce the transfer time, increase the processing volume, and provide increased throughput.