This is the first of two furnaces. In this furnace SiO2 layers are formed by cooking the
silicon wafers, at temperatures as high as 1100°C, in an atmosphere containing O2 or H20.
Wafers are loaded into a quartz wafer boat, and the boat moved into the furnace with a push rod. The bulk of the
furnace is taken up by the heating coils. These are driven to the desired oxidation temperature using three
closed-loop proportional-integral-differential (PID) controllers.