Beveridge, Degrandi Weilacher & Young, LLP
Heat treatment method and device
 A heat treatment device including a handling chamber that has a carriers feed in/out opening for carriers holding plural sheets of objects to be treated parallelly vertical, a vertical heat treatment furnace for heat treating the objects and a posture changer for swinging the carriers near the carriers feed in/out opening of the handling chamber on a rotational center into a territory of lower sides of the carriers to change the posture of the objects to be treated from the vertical position to the horizontal position. The heat treatment device also has a carriers storage unit disposed above the posture changing means for storing a plural number of posture changed carriers, conveying device for conveying the carriers between the storage unit and the posture changing device and the heat treatment furnace side. Also, provided is a transferrer for transferring the objects-to-be-treated to/from an objects-to-be-treated holder for loading and unloading into/out of the heat treatment furnace side. The posture changer swings the carriers on the rotational center to sides of the carriers to change the carriers' posture from vertical to horizontal so the carriers have postures changed along a swing track of a minimum radius with small bulge amounts and a minimum moving amount. Thus, a conveying distance and a conveying time for conveying the posture changed carriers to the upper storage unit be reduced, and the heat treatment device can be smaller-sized and have improved processing efficiency. 
Tokyo Electron Kabushiki Kaisha Tokyo Electron Tohoku Kabushiki Kaisha
H H H
H01L H01L H01L
inventional inventional inventional
Keiji Hisashi Tetsu Tsutomu Hiroyuki Ken Shingo
Takano Kikuchi Ohsawa Haraoka Iwai Nakao Watanabe