AVS 45th International Symposium
    Manufacturing Science and Technology Group Tuesday Sessions
       Session MS-TuA

Paper MS-TuA7
Design of a 300 mm CVD Tungsten Reactor using Computational Fluid Dynamics

Tuesday, November 3, 1998, 4:00 pm, Room 317

Session: Process, Integration, and Modeling
Presenter: E.J. McInerney, Novellus Systems
Authors: E.J. McInerney, Novellus Systems
T.M. Pratt, Novellus Systems
A. Tahari, Novellus Systems
Correspondent: Click to Email
Over the next several years, the semiconductor industry will transition to 300 mm wafers for IC fabrication. To support this shift, the semiconductor equipment companies must develop 300 mm processing tools that are both manufacturing worthy and cost effective. In the past, designing equipment for larger sizes was primarily a matter of scaling the components: chamber, showerheads, heaters, etc. For batch systems, often the batch size would also be reduced to minimize the gain in footprint. However, as capital equipment costs become an increasing fraction of wafer fabrication costs, it becomes necessary for semiconductor equipment to not only handle larger sizes, but also to be substantially more cost effective. We report here on how computational fluid dynamics modeling was used to guide the design and development of a high throughput, 300 mm multi-station CVD tungsten reactor. Through modeling we were able to investigate novel gas-based isolation schemes that allowed the individual deposition stations to run separate processes, without cross contamination. The resulting reactor can simultaneously deposit silane reduced and hydrogen reduced tungsten films at adjacent deposition stations without the danger of gas phase nucleation or WF@sub 6@ device attack. This leads is a significant drop in the idle time of deposition stations and a large boost in throughput.