Operations and Maintenance Manual Mechanical Description
Version 1.2 - June 2004 4 - 7
WAFER HANDLING AREA
ROBOT
The Equipe Technologies robot performs wafer transportation, moving among the
wafer cassette turrets, the pre-aligner, the work chucks, and the spin-rinse station.
The robot is equipped with a rotating wrist and a single vacuum chuck end effector to
permit picking the wafer up from either the bottom or top as needed. A wafer scanner
mounted on the robot maps occupied and empty cassette slots and detects cross-
slotted wafers. The robot automatically adjusts between 1/4-inch and 3/16-inch
spaced cassettes without mechanical adjustments.
A closed loop servo driven three-axis mechanism (a ball screw with a system of non-
expanding short belts) provides movement. The robot consists of the following
components: chassis, rotary unit, vertical displacement mechanism, arm, three DC
motors with belt transmission system, and cover.
The chassis is composed of two flanges, four steel supports, a mounting plate for the
motor, the transmission for the theta axis, and an aluminum c-shaped channel to
conduct cables and air hoses to the robot's arm.
The rotary unit gives support to the arm and provides angular displacement. It
consists of the unit carrier with six adjustable cam follower bearings for the vertical
displacement mechanism, a supporting plate, the vertical axis motor, a belt
transmission gear, and the main bearing. The rotary unit is also equipped with a small
aluminum reflective plate which, together with associated electronics, is used to
generate the limit and home signals.
The vertical displacement assembly utilizes a 5-mm pitch lead screw, a vertical tube
with four flat leading surfaces equally spaced around the tube, a lead screw support,
and a top ring used to attach the robot arm.
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