IUVSTA 15th International Vacuum Congress (IVC-15), AVS 48th International Symposium (AVS-48), 11th International Conference on Solid Surfaces (ICSS-11)
    Surface Engineering Tuesday Sessions
       Session SE-TuM

Paper SE-TuM5
Photoresist Removing using Atomic Hydrogen Generated by Heated Catalyzer

Tuesday, October 30, 2001, 9:40 am, Room 132

Session: Surface Engineering II: Cleaning, Modification, and Finishing
Presenter: A. Izumi, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), Japan
Authors: A. Izumi, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), Japan
H. Matsumura, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), Japan
Correspondent: Click to Email
It is well known that photoresist films play an important role to define very small pattern, selective etching, ion-implantation process, etc. The residues of photoresist films after these processes should be completely removed. Wet cleaning using a sulfuric acid and a hydrogen peroxide mixture succeeding to O@sub 2@ plasma ashing is used as a conventional removing method of the residues. However, this conventional method is not effective for removing high doped ion-implanted resists. O@sub 2@ ashing plasma induces a lot of problems such as plasma damage to devices and oxidizes semiconductor substrates and/or interlevel dielectric films. In this work, we propose a novel photoresist removing which is using atomic hydrogen. Atomic hydrogen is generated by decomposition of H@sub 2@ on a heated (1700°C) tungsten catalyzer. Therefore, the plasma damage and the oxidation are not matters of concern. Atomic hydrogen was irradiated to the photoresist coated Si(100) which was doped with B (50 kV, 10@super 15@ atoms/cm@super 2@) by ion-implantation. Following results are obtained. 1) X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy measurements reveal that 1 µm-thick photoresist is removed completely by 15 minutes irradiation of atomic hydrogen. 2) The photoresist removing rates increase as hydrogen flow rate increases. 3) The substrate holder temperature around 85 °C shows the highest photoresist removing rate. 4) Quadruple mass spectroscopy measurements detect a lot of kind of hydrocarbon species during the irradiation of atomic hydrogen. The above results show that this technique is effective for photoresist removing for various kinds of photolithography process.