Patent ID: 6927835

Claim:
A thermal control system for chemically-processing lithographic substrates, comprising: a measurement processing module to measure metrological attributes of said substrates and generate substrate metrological attribute information; a multi-zone thermal sensing unit containing a plurality of thermal sensor elements that detect the temperature of a plurality of pre-defined zones on said substrates; a multi-zone thermal adjustment unit containing a plurality of thermal coupler elements that adjusts the temperature of said pre-defined zones; and a thermal controller unit operatively and communicatively coupled to said measurement processing module, said multi-zone thermal sensing unit, and said multi-zone thermal adjustment unit, said thermal controller unit containing logic circuitry to receive information from said measurement processing module, said multi-zone thermal sensing unit, and said multi-zone thermal adjustment unit, to process information, and to supply information to said multi-zone thermal sensing unit and said multi-zone thermal adjustment unit, wherein said multi-zone thermal sensing unit communicates detected temperature information to said thermal controller unit, and wherein said thermal controller unit processes said detected temperature information, generates temperature control information based on said processed temperature information, and communicates said temperature control information to said multi-zone thermal adjustment unit to adjust the temperatures of said pre-defined zones.