Patent ID: 7942622

Claim:
A delivery position aligning method for use in a vacuum processing apparatus, the method comprising: preparing the vacuum processing apparatus which has a vacuum transfer chamber, a vacuum transfer mechanism, provided in the vacuum transfer chamber, for transferring a substrate in a vacuum atmosphere, a plurality of vacuum processing chambers, connected to the vacuum transfer chamber, for performing a vacuum processing on the substrate, a load lock chamber connected to the vacuum transfer chamber, an atmospheric transfer chamber connected to the load lock chamber, an atmospheric transfer mechanism, provided in the atmospheric transfer chamber, for transferring the substrate in an atmospheric atmosphere, an orienter for detecting a position of the substrate in the atmospheric atmosphere, and a position detecting mechanism, arranged in the vacuum transfer chamber, for detecting a position of the substrate; aligning the atmospheric transfer mechanism and the load lock chamber by using the orienter; disposing the substrate at a position of the load lock chamber by using the atmospheric transfer mechanism aligned with respect to the load lock chamber by the orienter; transferring the substrate disposed at a predetermined position of each of access points of the vacuum transfer mechanism to the position detecting mechanism by the vacuum transfer mechanism to detect a position of the substrate, wherein the access points of the vacuum transfer mechanism include the vacuum processing chambers and the load lock chamber; and performing position alignment for each of the access points by using a detection result.