This investigation focuses on process control for commercial inductively coupled plasma (ICP) etchers under manufacturing conditions. Plasma processes close to active zones of surface-sensitive devices are critical, demanding minimal damage caused by ion bombardment and so an excellent process understanding and control. In order to get the ion energy below the surface damage limit, RF biasing at the substrate is switched off. The plasma process then works in a downstreamlike mode. Without Faraday shielding, capacitive coupling must always be considered. Also with very low bias power, the ion energy can still be too high. Without bias power, bias matchbox capacitances are used as control elements for the ion energy. To ensure a high reliability for this control solution in a running production line, a combined RF and plasma model of the entire system with this special setup is presented and validated. The etch rate shows that the RF peak voltage measurement in the bias matchbox does not represent the ion energy at the substrate. The sheath voltage provided by the model is closely related to the ion energy and shows a reasonable correlation with the etch rate of the photoresist on test wafers. This relation shows the transition of chemical etching at low ion energies to ion-assisted etching with increasing sheath voltage.
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January 2022
Research Article|
December 30 2021
Ion energy control in an industrial ICP etch chamber without bias power usage
Special Collection:
Plasma Processing for Advanced Microelectronics
Michael Klick
;
Michael Klick
a)
1
Plasmetrex GmbH
, Schwarzschildstrasse 3, 12489 Berlin, Germany
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Hans-Peter Maucher
Hans-Peter Maucher
a)
2
United Monolithic Semiconductors GmbH
, Wilhelm-Runge-Strasse 11, 89081 Ulm, Germany
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Note: This paper is a part of the Special Topic Collection on Plasma Processing for Advanced Microelectronics.
J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B 40, 012203 (2022)
Article history
Received:
September 20 2021
Accepted:
December 15 2021
Citation
Michael Klick, Hans-Peter Maucher; Ion energy control in an industrial ICP etch chamber without bias power usage. J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B 1 January 2022; 40 (1): 012203. https://doi.org/10.1116/6.0001477
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