IUVSTA 15th International Vacuum Congress (IVC-15), AVS 48th International Symposium (AVS-48), 11th International Conference on Solid Surfaces (ICSS-11)
    Manufacturing Science and Technology Monday Sessions
       Session MS-MoP

Paper MS-MoP5
Application of Plasma V@sub dc@ Bias Diagnostics Cathode For Device Charging Damage Optimization

Monday, October 29, 2001, 5:30 pm, Room 134/135

Session: Aspects of Manufacturing Science and Technology Poster Session
Presenter: S. Ma, Applied Materials
Authors: S. Ma, Applied Materials
K. Horioka, Applied Materials, Japan
R. Lindley, Applied Materials
K. Doan, Applied Materials
S. Kats, Applied Materials
M. Dahimene, Applied Materials
Y. Xia, Applied Materials
H. Shan, Applied Materials
Correspondent: Click to Email
It is highly desirable to investigate the potential plasma damage issues as early as in the stage of plasma process chamber development without processing the real device wafers. Therefore a diagnostic tool is required to give reliable relationship to real device plasma damage and fast feedback on any process or hardware change. In this paper, a V@sub dc@ bias diagnostic cathode is used to measure the plasma induced self bias uniformity across the wafer and the correlation to device charging damage. A Magnetically Enhanced Reactive Ion Etching (MERIE) chamber is used to install this diagnostic cathode. Multiple probe pins are buried within the electrostatic chuck surface with only the top surface tips exposed to plasma. Wafer surface DC bias voltage during plasma process can be directly measured from these probes simultaneously with built-in circuitry. Real-time analysis of V@sub dc@ bias is thus feasible by multi-channel recording of bias evolution. The maximum bias difference (@delta@V@sub dc@ = V@sub dc(max)@ - V@sub dc(min)@) between the maximum and the minimum value of simultaneously measured V@sub dc@ across the cathode surface can be used to correlate to the potential driving voltage on the wafer to generate device damaging current during plasma process. Compared to real antenna MOS capacitor device damage data under similar process conditions, when @delta@V@sub dc@is less than a threshold around 12V then plasma induced charging damage is not a concern. This method also shows successful examples of different process recipes and hardware optimization to meet industrial device plasma damage spec.