A tray engine includes a vertical drive column, a rotation mechanism for rotating the vertical drive column, and an end effector attached to the vertical drive column. The end effector includes an end effector base attached to the vertical drive column. The end effector further includes a slide attached to the end effector base to support a tray, when present. The slide enables the tray to slide along a length of the end effector base. The tray engine includes a drive mechanism attached to the end effector base for moving along the length of the end effector base to enable the tray, when present, to slide linearly along the length and load or unload the tray to or from the slide.

A system includes a substrate support on which to receive a transparent substrate, a non-contact sensor adapted to detect and image a dot pattern etched on a front surface of the transparent substrate, and a processing device attached to the non-contact sensor. The processing device may determine, using imaging data from the non-contact sensor, an orientation of a right-angled edge of the dot pattern. The processing device may determine, based on the orientation of the right-angled edge, whether a front surface of the transparent substrate is facing up or facing down. The processing device may also direct a robot to transfer the transparent substrate to a processing chamber dependent on whether the front surface of the transparent substrate is facing up or facing down.

A unit sorting system comprising: a net table for receiving units and a unit lifter for depositing said units on the net table; the net table having a first and second zone; wherein the unit lifter is arranged to engage a batch of units and then deposit a first half of the batch to the first zone and deposit a first half of the batch to the second zone.

A support member system is described for association with an overhead transport system. The support member system provides a safety feature to the overhead transport system by which the overhead transport system is able to avoid damage to wafers that are contained within a wafer cassette that is unintentionally released by the overhead transport system. The support member system is able to prevent such released cassettes from impacting the ground or tools located under the overhead transport system. The support member system targets wafer cassettes that have dimensions which are different than the dimensions of wafer cassettes for which the overhead transport system was originally designed to transport. Stocker systems for receiving, storing and delivering different types of wafer cassettes are also described.

Methods and apparatus for classifying semiconductor wafers. The method can include: sorting a set of semiconductor wafers, using a model, into a plurality of sub-sets based on parameter data corresponding to one or more parameters of the set of semiconductor wafers, wherein the parameter data for semiconductor wafers in a sub-set include one or more common characteristics; identifying one or more semiconductor wafers within a sub-set based on a probability of the one or more semiconductor wafers being correctly allocated to the sub-set; comparing the parameter data of the one or more identified semiconductor wafers to reference parameter data; and reconfiguring the model based on the comparison. The comparison is undertaken by a human to provide constraints for the model. The apparatus can be configured to undertake the method.

Disclosed are methods and systems of controlling the placement of micro-objects on the surface of a micro-assembler. Control patterns may be used to cause electrodes of the micro-assembler to generate dielectrophoretic (DEP) and electrophoretic (EP) forces which may be used to manipulate, move, position, or orient one or more micro-objects on the surface of the micro-assembler. The control patterns may be part of a library of control patterns.

A chip grading method includes: electrical performance test data of at least one wafer is acquired; chips on the wafer are grouped by using a clustering analysis algorithm according to the electrical performance test data of the wafer, so as to obtain a group to which each of the chips belongs, and a clustering model is established; for each group, a feature set of each group is extracted by using a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) algorithm, and a PCA model is established; the chips in each group are ranked according to scores of the chips in the group with respect to each of a preset number of features in the feature set, so as to obtain a level to which each of the chips belongs; and grading results of the chips are obtained according to both the group and the level to which each chip belongs.

A method and apparatus for loading substrates in an inspection station is disclosed herein. In one embodiment a loading module is disclosed that includes a loading station for two or more substrate cassettes, a first lane comprising a first conveyor that is substantially aligned with one of the two or more substrate cassettes and a conveyor system, a second lane comprising a second conveyor that is substantially aligned with another of the two or more substrate cassettes and positioned in a spaced-apart relation relative to the first lane, and a lateral transfer module positioned between the first lane and the second lane that is adapted to move substrates from the second lane to the first lane.

A method a for controlling a distribution sequence for a semiconductor device includes: acquiring the quantity of all chambers and an actual working duration of each radio frequency device in the machines; providing an optimal working duration of the radio frequency device to calculate an average interval; sorting all the data to form a first queue data set, and obtaining a difference between adjacent data in the first queue data set; using a difference between adjacent consecutive data as a feature value corresponding to the former or latter data in the consecutive data, and using data that does not correspond to the difference as a feature value corresponding to the data; obtaining a second queue data set and a third queue data set; and obtaining a distribution sequence of distributing N batches of wafers to all the radio frequency devices.

A wafer-measuring apparatus and a wafer-transferring method of the wafer-measuring apparatus. The wafer-measuring apparatus includes a body, a wafer-measuring unit, a wafer storage, and a robot. The robot is disposed on the body and configured to move a wafer from a first wafer container to the wafer-measuring unit. The first wafer container is disposed on a load port area. The robot moves the wafer from the wafer-measuring unit to the wafer storage after the wafer-measuring unit measures the wafer.