AVS 45th International Symposium
    Plasma Science and Technology Division Monday Sessions
       Session PS2-MoA

Paper PS2-MoA3
Modeling High-Density Plasma Etching of Aluminum and Photoresist@footnote 1@

Monday, November 2, 1998, 2:40 pm, Room 318/319/320

Session: Diagnostics I
Presenter: E. Meeks, Sandia National Laboratories
Authors: P. Ho, Sandia National Laboratories
E. Meeks, Sandia National Laboratories
A. Ting, Sandia National Laboratories
S.J. Choi, Sandia National Laboratories
Correspondent: Click to Email
A plasma-etch mechanism has been developed to describe the high-density plasma etching of aluminum in BCl@sub 3@/Cl@sub 2@/Ar mixtures. Results of extensive validation comparisons with experimental data are shown for several different reactor models employing the aluminum-etch mechanism. Comparisons are made to diagnostic measurements of the gas-phase, including electron density, electron temperature, Cl@super -@ density, and relative radical densities, as well as to ion-flux and wafer-etch data from a commercial reactor. The reactor models employed include a well mixed reactor model and a 2-D axisymmetric plasma-flow model that can handle several, detailed surface-chemistry descriptions for different plasma-materials interfaces in the reactor. The gas-phase plasma chemistry mechanism includes dissociation, ionization, and excitation of etch products to accurately capture macroscopic loading effects. The gas-phase chemistry and aluminum-etch mechanisms provide very good quantitative agreement between the models and the wide collection of observations and measurements available in this study. Simulation results from the 2-D model predict well the measured radial uniformity for blanket-aluminum etching. In addition to the aluminum-etch mechanism, a simple description of photoresist etching is introduced, which reproduces most of the observed trends for blanket photoresist etching in the BCl@sub 3@/Cl@sub 2@/Ar plasmas. @FootnoteText@ @footnote 1@This work was supported by a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement between SEMATECH and Sandia National Laboratories. Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC04-94AL85000