Fixture‐based industrial robot calibration for silicon wafer handling

Purpose – Semiconductor manufacturing industry requires highly accurate robot operation with short install/setup downtime. Design/methodology/approach – We develop a fast, low cost and easy‐to‐operate calibration system for wafer‐handling robots. The system is defined by a fixture and a simple compensation algorithm. Given robot repeatability, end effector uncertainties, and the tolerance requirements of wafer placement points, we derive fixture design and placement specifications based on a statistical tolerance model. Findings – By employing the fixture‐based calibration, we successfully relax the tolerance requirement of the end effector by 20 times. Originality/value – Semiconductor manufacturing requires fast and easy‐to‐operate calibration systems for wafer‐handling robots. In this paper, we describe a new methodology to solve this problem using fixtures. We develop fixture design criteria and a simple compensate algorithm to satisfy calibration requirements. We also verify our approach by a physical example.