A sliding mode control strategy is developed for temperature control of a rapid thermal processing (RTP)
system to enhance temperature accuracy and uniformity when heating in this work. Temperature
dynamics of the RTP is nonlinear and infinite-dimensional while order of the controller should be finite
due to implementation limitations. Developing a nonlinear low-order controller for the system is
important if accurate and uniform control of the temperature is required. This work addresses this issue
by developing a sliding mode controller based on the dominant modes of the system. The schemes are
applied to a RTP system and excellent performances are achieved