AVS 45th International Symposium
    Manufacturing Science and Technology Group Wednesday Sessions
       Session MS-WeM

Paper MS-WeM10
Application of an Inductively-Coupled Plasma Source to Destruction and Abatement of Fluorine-based Gases

Wednesday, November 4, 1998, 11:20 am, Room 317

Session: Advanced Process Equipment and ES&H
Presenter: L.J. Mahoney, Advanced Energy Industries
Authors: L.J. Mahoney, Advanced Energy Industries
D.C. Carter, Advanced Energy Industries
M.S. Amann, Advanced Energy Industries
G.A. Roche, Advanced Energy Industries
Correspondent: Click to Email
Recently high density plasma sources have been used to assist in the abatement of residual hydro-fluorocarbon and per-fluorocarbon gases which are used in many manufacturing processes. In this application, oxygen-containing gas mixtures are added with the exhaust gases from a vacuum process chamber within the foreline of a processing system. The mixture is then activated by a high-density plasma means in order to converted the hydro-fluorocarbon and per-fluorocarbon process gases into constituents that are more easily removed from the exhaust within an air scrubber. An economical and modular inductively-coupled plasma source has been devised to investigate the power coupling and process requirements necessary to effectively abate post-process gases by this method. The relatively high power density source is configurable to operate near 400 kHz , 2 MHz or at 13.56 MHz with more than 2 kW of delivered power. Abatement destruction efficiencies are shown for several gases including CF@sub 4@, C@sub 2@F@sub 6@, CHF@sub 3@, and SF@sub 6@ as determined by mass spectroscopy over a wide range of power, pressure, and total flow conditions and range of added oxygen/argon/nitrogen gas mixtures.