A review of the automation of the Czochralski crystal growth process

Abstract

On the occasion of the centennial of the invention of the Czochralski crystal growth process by the Polish scientist Jan Czochralski, a review of selected strategies for the automatic control of this process is given. This review provides a sketch of the fundamental challenges of controlling the Czochralski process and the basic concepts of feedback control. Both early and modern approaches to the control of the Czochralski process are described. The discussion focuses on questions related to feed-forward control, feedback control, and state estimation. The presented methods rely on simple mathematical process models in contrast to the finite element model-based approaches typically used in crystal growth process design and analysis. Such mathematical models motivate both the structure and parameters of the chosen controller. A comprehensive list of references to background literature on this topic completes this survey.