IUVSTA 15th International Vacuum Congress (IVC-15), AVS 48th International Symposium (AVS-48), 11th International Conference on Solid Surfaces (ICSS-11)
    Plasma Science Thursday Sessions
       Session PS-ThP

Paper PS-ThP29
Study on the Low Angle Forward Reflected Neutral Beam Etching System

Thursday, November 1, 2001, 5:30 pm, Room 134/135

Session: Plasma Etching Poster Session
Presenter: D.H. Lee, Sungkyunkwan University, Korea
Authors: D.H. Lee, Sungkyunkwan University, Korea
J.W. Bae, Sungkyunkwan University, Korea
S.D. Park, Sungkyunkwan University, Korea
G.Y. Yeom, Sungkyunkwan University, Korea
Correspondent: Click to Email
Plasma etching is one of the key technologies in the fabrication of deep submicron silicon based integrated circuit. However, plasma etching could give serious disadvantages due to the energetic charged particles generated in the plasma which cause radiation damage such as physical defect, increased gate oxide breakdown, charging, etc. To avoid these charge-related and physical impact-related damages, several low-damage processes have been proposed. One possible alternative to avoid these problems is a low energy neutral beam etching. In this study, neutral beam has been generated using a low angle forward reflected neutral beam and its characteristics such as the degree of neutralization, etch characteristics, etc. have been studied as a possible anisotropic etching technique without charging. When the reactive ion beam was reflected on a reflector at the angles lower than 15°, most of the ions reflected were neutralized and also the lower reflector angle showed the higher degree of neutralization. Complete removal of the ions in the reflected beam could be accomplished by installing a retarding grid system between the sample and the reflector and by applying a potential higher than the maximum ion energy of the flux. This reflected neutral beam source has been devised to be scaleable to a large diameter and also to etch polymer and SiO@sub 2@ anisotropically. In order to obtain a large flux from the ion source, inductively coupled plasma was used as the plasma source and specially prepared extraction grids which have very dense and small holes were used. Details of the developed neutral beam source and its properties will be discussed in addition to the etch characteristics obtained using the low angle reflected neutral beam source.