Sensorless Force Control for High-speed Pressurization

Force control technology needs a breakthrough to be used for practical purposes because it is rarely used in the industry although it is being improved in academic circles. We propose solving problems of conventional position control in pressurization using high-speed sensorless force control for the IC testing handler used in semiconductor manufacturing. The key techniques to solve the problem are piecewise polynomial trajectory generation to meet needs for high-speed operation, a model-following force servo to achieve pressurizing conditions, and a disturbance observer to estimate pressurization. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed in experiments.