Patent ID: 7910863

Claim:
A temperature setting method of a thermal processing plate for mounting and thermally processing a substrate thereon, said method comprising the steps of: dividing the thermal processing plate into a plurality of regions within a thermal processing chamber; setting a temperature for each of the regions with a controllable heater; and adjusting an in-plane temperature of the thermal processing plate by setting a temperature correction value for each of the regions of the thermal processing plate, said adjusting step comprising the steps of: decomposing an in-plane tendency of current line widths of a resist pattern within a substrate for which a series of substrate processing including the thermal processing has been finished into a plurality of in-plane tendency components using a Zernike polynomial, said line widths being defined along a thickness direction of the substrate, the in-plane tendency being a line width of the resist pattern at a plurality of points in the thickness direction within the substrate; calculating an improvable in-plane tendency of the line widths of the substrate by adding up in-plane tendency components improvable by setting the temperature correction values for the regions of the plurality of in-plane tendency components; and calculating an in-plane tendency of the line widths after improvement by subtracting the improvable in-plane tendency from the in-plane tendency of the current line widths.