Semiconductor
Power PMAC motion control for Semiconductor Equipment Nanometre-level control for wafer handling, lithography, inspection, die attach and laser processing
25 μs servo cycle · Direct PWM current-loop control · Position-triggered camera and laser firing
Faraday Motion Controls design and supply motion control systems for semiconductor manufacturing and test equipment, based on the OMRON Power PMAC platform. Applications range from wafer handling and sorting through to lithography stages, inspection systems, die attach and laser processing.
Power PMAC support a wide range of motors, drives and feedback devices, over standard and advanced protocols and closes the servo loop at up to 25 μs for five axes on CK3M and CK5M hardware.
-
Wafer handling and sorting.
Load ports, aligners, robot arms and sorters. Jerk-limited trajectory profiles reduce acceleration transients during transfer moves, and coordinated multi-axis motion allows handoffs between mechanisms to be planned by a single controller.
-
Lithography and direct-write stages.
Long-travel XY stages using linear motors, air bearings and high-resolution or interferometric feedback. Power PMAC provides gantry control with leader-follower relationships and yaw correction within the servo loop, and applies two- and three-dimensional cross-axis compensation to correct stage geometry.
-
Wafer inspection and review.
Step-and-settle positioning for die-by-die imaging, or constant-velocity scanning with hardware compare outputs triggering the camera or strobe at defined encoder positions. Trigger generation is handled by the position hardware, so it is not subject to software timing variation.
-
Die attach, bonding and dispensing.
Coordinated XY, theta and Z motion with vision-based position correction applied to a move in progress. Hardware-latched registration inputs record axis positions the moment an external trigger occurs.
-
Laser dicing, annealing and ablation.
Coordinated stage and scanner motion with laser firing referenced to position rather than time. Multiple heads can be controlled from a single controller to maintain their relationship to each other.
-
Photonics and fibre alignment.
Multi-axis peak-search routines written in C and executed on the controller, closing on optical power or other analogue feedback within the real-time loop.
Feedback interfaces include quadrature, 1 Vpp sinusoidal with interpolation, EnDat, BiSS, SSI, and analogue inputs, allowing the encoder to be selected on application grounds. Command interfaces include ±10 V analogue, step and direction, EtherCAT, and Direct PWM, in which the controller closes the current loop and the amplifier acts as a power stage. Direct PWM is generally the appropriate choice for linear motors and voice coils.
Servo, compensation and safety functions run on the controller alongside PLC logic written in PMAC Script or C. Data gathering at servo rate on any internal variable is available for commissioning and fault diagnosis. Custom servo algorithm can be written in C and executed within the servo interrupt.
CK3M and CK5M modular controllers suit tools with up to five or ten local axes, configured from the axis interface modules required. CK3E provides an EtherCAT-only option where the machine is networked throughout. Power Brick LV combines the controller with four or eight low-voltage drives up to 5A continuous / 15A peak. Power UMAC supports larger systems, with up to 256 axes across local cards, EtherCAT and MACRO fibre.
Discuss a project
Send us the machine specification or the control requirement and we can advise on whether Power PMAC is a suitable platform, and what hardware configuration would be required.
