The optimal design and control of a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) reactor is an important issue in the microelectronics industry. In the optimal control problem, the goal is to determine a set of parameters that will yield a target temperature distribution in a CVD reactor. In this talk, we examine the issues of using optimization methods for the design and control of CVD reactors for which the objective function is expensive, noisy, and derivatives are not readily available.

1996-1997 Mathematics in High Performance Computing