Patent ID: 7897896

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, said adjusting step comprising the steps of: measuring line widths of a resist pattern within a substrate which has been subjected to a series of substrate processing including thermal processing, said line widths being defined along a thickness direction of the substrate; calculating, from an in-plane tendency of the substrate of the measured line widths, an improvable and unimprovable in-plane tendency by changing the temperature correction value for each of the regions of the thermal processing plate, the in-plane tendency being a line width of the resist pattern at a plurality of points in the thickness direction within the substrate; and adding an average remaining in-plane tendency of the calculated improvable in-plane tendency to the calculated unimprovable in-plane tendency to estimate an in-plane tendency of the line widths after a change of the temperature correction values for the thermal processing plate, calculating the average remaining in-plane tendency through the steps of: a first step of measuring the line widths of the resist pattern within the substrate for the substrate which has been subjected to substrate processing, and calculating, from an in-plane tendency of the substrate of the measured line widths, an improvable in-plane tendency by changing the temperature correction value for each of the regions of the thermal processing plate; a second step of calculating, from the calculated improvable in-plane tendency, the temperature correction value for each of the regions of the thermal processing plate to bring the improvable in-plane tendency to zero using a calculation model obtained from a correlation between the improvable in-plane tendency and the temperature correction values; a third step of changing a set temperature of each of the regions of the thermal processing plate to the calculated temperature correction value; a fourth step of calculating a remaining tendency of the improvable in-plane tendency after improvement by changing the set temperature to the temperature correction value; and a fifth step of averaging remaining in-plane tendencies in said resist pattern calculated in a plurality of times of a performance of said first to fourth steps.