Society drives demand for more, faster, smaller, less energy consumption and greater diversification. This program deals with new mechatronic solutions to support the development of next-generation lithography machines that do not only need to become more accurate but should also remain cost effective, both in terms of productivity/throughput and absolute cost of goods. The latter is in particular important to enable future chip architectures that require increasingly more complex and thus expensive process steps.
This project focusses on three specific topics that aim to enable more cost efficient system designs, namely, i) more versatile damping models and methods for damping parameter identification to improve the predictability of dynamical performance leading to less conservative system designs, ii) improved thermal control to allow system designs with materials that have relaxed thermal expansions specifications by bridging the gap between frequency-based identification methods and time-domain control methods, and iii) an alternative more cost effective design for the reticle masking module by replacing the conventional linear guidance with a crank-shaft.