the carrier ring back into the carousel the wafer back in the carrier ring and pulls the below out of the wafer transfer plane 14 establishing a large vacuum chamber with ample room to directly connect very large pumps with appropriate pumping openings and conductance in fig4 the pump connection is shown as the large opening on the bottom left but could be arranged equivalently too the process chamber is sealed with the bellows thereby redirecting all vacuum and pressure resulting forces to radially balanced forces instead of unbalanced opening forces this allows for much lighter mechanical systems a vacuum process system for the treatment of substrates comprising at least one process chamber and a transfer chamber and means for removing gases from said process system pumping means and means for sealing said process chamber at least temporarily from said transfer chamber wherein during transfer of a substrate the pumping means are being operatively connected to both the transfer chamber and the process chamber while during processing the pumping means are operatively connected solely to the process chamber volume the invention can also be understood and described as follows with reference to fig4 a substrate is located during transfer in a transfer plane substrate 13 in fig4 left and is being moved e g lifted.