AVS 47th International Symposium
    Plasma Science and Technology Tuesday Sessions
       Session PS-TuP

Paper PS-TuP25
Process Performance Evaluation of Low Damage Sources

Tuesday, October 3, 2000, 5:30 pm, Room Exhibit Hall C & D

Session: Poster Session
Presenter: X. Tang, College of William and Mary
Authors: X. Tang, College of William and Mary
D. Manos, College of William and Mary
Correspondent: Click to Email
We have performed a comparative study to characterize and evaluate the performance of two low damage sources, a surface reflection neutral source and a pulsed ICP source. The neutral stream was characterized using sensitive momentum and microcalorimetric energy analyzers to detemine that the neutral energy of our source is tunable between 3-6 eV and that the neutral flux is on the order of 3 x 10@super 15@cm@super -2@ s@super -1@. These results are in excellent agreement with earlier published flux values@footnote 1@ inferred from the stripping rate measurements and are also in excellent agreement with our previous Monte Carlo simulations.@footnote 2@ A pulsed rfi plasma source (200Hz to 10kHz) was also characterized using a Langmuir probes deploying two different data analysis methods to extract plasma density and electron temperature and to follow mode transitions in the source operation. The probe measurements indicate that there is an optimal pulse frequency in our source at around 1kHz. We have performed a zero-dimensional, explicit-time, kinetic model simulation of the pulsed behavior of this source which agrees very well with the observed values of the density, temperature, and trends of pressure and power dependence and with the temporal behavior as a function of pulse length and duty cycle. Experimental studies comparing the neutral stream to direct and downstream plasma exposure indicates that fast neutrals induces much lesss damage than exposure to the pulsed plasma source and that most of the damage from neutral operation comes from exposure to UV photons. Preliminary experiments using the fast neutral bombardment to do low-temperature growth of both stable and metastable films in a charge-free environment will also be presented in this paper. @FootnoteText@ @footnote 1@X.Tang, C.A.Nichols, and D.M.Manos, J. Appl. Phys. 86:2419, 1999 @footnote 2@C.Nichols and D.Manos, J. Appl.Phys. 80:2643,1996.