Ultra-Low Temperature Chillers for Semiconductor Manufacturing Process

The growth of the semiconductor market and advancement of manufacturing technology have led to an increase in wafer size and highly integrated semiconductor devices. The temperature of the supplied cooling medium from the chiller that removes the heat produced in the semiconductor manufacturing process is required to be at a lower level because of the high integration. The Joule-Thomson cooling cycle, which uses a mixed refrigerant (MR) to produce the cooling medium at a level of −100°C required for the semiconductor process, has recently gained attention. When a MR is used, the chiller’s performance is heavily influenced by the composition and proportions of the refrigerant charged to the chiller system. Therefore, this paper introduces a cooling cycle that uses an MR to achieve the required low temperature of −100°C in the semiconductor manufacturing process and provides the results of simple experiments to determine the effects of different MR compositions.