17072020 1594997509

Accurate positioning of wafers to fulfil tasks such as exposure, inspection or dicing, is typically achieved in semiconductor manufacturing by means of high-precision fast moving stages. The actual required position accuracy is sub-nanometre, which results in stringent requirements on the output current accuracy and bandwidth of the power amplifiers that drive the various actuators. Advances in this area, among others, have led to increasingly small feature sizes. Additionally, semiconductor manufacturers strive to minimise machine operating cost by maximizing its throughput. As a result, the demand for electrical power increases continuously. To be able to evaluate the performance of a power amplifier in a high-precision mechatronic system, a holistic modelling approach is proposed in the thesis that incorporates models of the corresponding mechanical, electrical and control systems. This modelling method is independent of the actual implementation of the amplifier, and provides insight into the impact of various error mechanisms of a power amplifier to the position accuracy of a mechatronic system. Furthermore, the obtained desired values for output voltage, output current, and control bandwidth are used as system parameters for the remaining research.

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