Jul 12 2007
Following the successful launch of its fast-swap, dual wrist robot, the Silicon Valley-based Innovative Robotics announces a powerful enhancement: the ability to pick and place two wafers at once, while retaining the ability to pick and place single wafers. With this feature, customers can enjoy the advantages of two independent wrists for fast-swapping of wafers at the tool, while gaining additional speed by handling two wafers at once at the FOUPs (Front Opening Unified Pod). With the new capability, users can choose from single-pick, batch-pick, single-place and batch-place at every station. This is in addition to the SCARA (Selectively Compliant Articulated Robot Arm) flexibility expected by its customers, allowing access to the three FOUPs across without requiring a linear track.
“Our process tool customers are very excited about this new capability,” said S.K. Kim, President at Cymechs, a leading Korean cluster tool and EFEM (Equipment Front End Module) manufacturer. “The double-wafer pick, coupled with the fast-swapping dual wrist, offers at least 30% over-all throughput improvement, a big gap for other competitors to catch up to.”
M.K. Lee, Sales Director at Cymechs, pointed out: “The recent Release 2.1 software has made our developers’ jobs easier. The new user-customizable recovery capability has made recovery from anomalous situations as easy as it is for r-theta robots while giving us the SCARA’s extra degree of freedom. Our developers only have to define “safe” recovery paths, and the controller automates the handling of those paths. Release 2.1 also gave us the capability to set user outputs automatically based on robot poses, allowing our customers to use PLCs for control of FOUPs, loadlocks, and other equipment that interacts with the robot.”