Stop Wasting Heat in Your Glovebox
If you’ve ever heated silicon wafers inside a glovebox, you know the struggle. Standard quartz lamps throw heat in every single direction. Half of your energy just disappears, warming up the housing or the walls of the box instead of your wafer. It’s a waste of power and a headache for your setup. We fixed this by adding gold-coated reflectors. Instead of letting that heat wander, we bounce it right back onto the wafer. Why gold? Simple. Gold is incredible at reflecting infrared light. By adding a thin, high-purity layer to the back of the reflector, we can push way more energy toward the target. This means your wafers hit the target temperature faster. You aren’t just saving electricity; you’re saving time. Keeping things cool (where it matters) Gloveboxes are cramped. If you pump too much raw power into a lamp to compensate for heat loss, you end up with “heat soak,” where the rest of your chamber starts getting way too hot. Because the gold coating focuses the energy so well, you don’t have to over-spec your power supply. You get a tight, controlled heat profile that stays where it belongs—on the wafer—and leaves the rest of your gear alone. A few things to keep in mind Now, it’s not magic, and there are a couple of catches. Since the heat is so focused, the “sweet spot” is smaller. If your wafer isn’t sitting exactly at the focal point, you’ll get uneven heating. You’ll want to be really precise with your Z-axis height. Also, gold is a bit picky. If your process uses corrosive gases, those chemicals can eat away at the coating, causing it to pit or peel. If that’s your situation, just shield the reflectors and you’ll be fine. Getting it running We designed these to be simple drop-in replacements for your current IR arrays. We used heavy-duty connectors so you don’t have to worry about terminals burning out under high current. Hook it up to a PID controller for your temperature ramps, and you’ll notice the difference immediately. Your ramp-up time per cycle just got a lot shorter.