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

Paper MS-WeM5
Evaluation of Chamber Liners, in TCP Metal Etchers, to Reduce the Equipment Clean Time and to Increase the Mean Time between Cleans

Wednesday, November 4, 1998, 9:40 am, Room 317

Session: Advanced Process Equipment and ES&H
Presenter: J. Sappidi, VLSI Technology, Inc.
Authors: J. Sappidi, VLSI Technology, Inc.
A. Liu, VLSI Technology, Inc.
D. Parks, VLSI Technology, Inc.
W. Au, VLSI Technology, Inc.
S. Smith, VLSI Technology, Inc.
Correspondent: Click to Email
Implementation of in-situ clean in TCP metal etchers has decreased the defect density and increased the sort yield. However, the polymer treated with in-situ clean plasma is very difficult to remove. Soaking the chamber wall with DI water or scrubbing the chamber wall to remove polymer have disadvantages. Water absorbed by chamber walls during soaking take a long time to out gas, this increases the equipment downtime. Scrubbing the chamber is very labor intensive and extends the clean time. Scrubbing combined with reactive ion bombardment during plasma processing accelerates the erosion of the chamber walls anodization. In order to reduce the clean time and increase the life of anodization on chamber walls, a set of chamber liners were evaluated. When the machine goes down for clean, rather than cleaning the entire inside chamber wall, the dirty liners can be replaced with the clean ones. This helps in reducing the cleaning time and protects the chamber anodization from eroding. . These liners were evaluated for 0.5 µm and 0.35 µm technologies. Installation of chamber liners demonstrated less than five percent process shift in terms of etchrates and selectivities. Experiments also demonstrated the metal etch process repeatability of the liner kits installation after chamber wet clean. The metal etch related defects were monitored with and without liners. The sort yield data was also collected and analyzed. The reactor with chamber liners proved superior in terms of both cleanliness and sort yield.