Out on the fab floor, an SRD that leaves a watermark or a particle on the wafer doesn’t just look bad—it bleeds yield. The infrared lamp is the thermal driver of the whole cycle, and it sets the line between a dry that fits the thermal budget and one that stresses the film. What matters, technically We design SRD infrared lamps around the process window, not a glossy spec sheet. Short-wave NIR gets you a fast temperature ramp, and the quartz envelope plus reflector geometry keep wafer-level uniformity within ±0.1°C across the spin. The output stays stable enough to protect photoresist integrity after soft bake and hard bake, and it runs 24/7 without adding particles—fit for cleanroom Class 1–100. Repeatability comes down to hitting the same setpoint, cycle after cycle, with minimal drift over thousands of hours. Why it works in an SRD In an SRD, the lamp has to evaporate the rinse without cooking the substrate or the polymer stack. Tight thermal control cuts the dry phase, keeps critical dimension control tight, and lowers scrap. You pick up throughput headroom and predictable maintenance intervals, while energy use drops thanks to efficient NIR coupling and fast thermal response. On lithography lines, that means fewer rework lots and a consistent, line-of-sight thermal history on every wafer. Here are the practical details Installation has to be spot-on: optical alignment to the spin axis and a clean interface to the chamber. Get it off and you’ll see hot spots and uneven drying. The lamp runs within specified voltage and coolant parameters, and the chamber geometry needs to match the reflector profile. Plan on a short burn-in, then periodic output checks to keep that ±0.1°C uniformity across the full SRD duty cycle.