AVS 50th International Symposium
    Plasma Science and Technology Tuesday Sessions
       Session PS-TuP

Paper PS-TuP10
Production of Electron-Temperature-Controllable ECR Plasma for Thin Film Deposition

Tuesday, November 4, 2003, 5:30 pm, Room Hall A-C

Session: Poster Session
Presenter: N. Itagaki, Kyushu University, Japan
Authors: N. Itagaki, Kyushu University, Japan
H. Muta, Kyushu University, Japan
N. Ishii, Tokyo Electron Co. Ltd., Japan
Y. Kawai, Kyushu University, Japan
Correspondent: Click to Email
In semiconductor processing, it is required to control the electron temperature (T@sub e@) in the plasma for progress of microelectronic devices and minimization of substrate damage. An electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) plasma source has attracted much attention for its high electron density that can be achieved at low gas pressure. However, in a conventional ECR plasma produced by 2.45 GHz microwave, T@sub e@ is relatively high and quite hard to be controlled in a wide range. Recently, we have clarified that T@sub e@ in a 915 MHz ECR plasma depends on the spatial profiles of the microwave power absorption by both the measurement of electromagnetic waves and the calculation of microwave power absorptions. Since the power absorption profile is influenced by the effective resonance zone width (@DELTA@z@sub res@, above-mentioned results implies that T@sub e@ can be controlled by varying @DELTA@z@sub res@ which is determined from the magnetic field gradient and the microwave frequency. In this report, the spatial profiles of wave patterns were measured at different @DELTA@z@sub res@ to make clear the relationship between the power absorption profiles and @DELTA@z@sub res@. Furthermore, we tried to control T@sub e@ by changing the magnetic field gradient in order to examine whether or not the above-mentioned way to control T@sub e@ is an effective method. As a result, the power absorption profiles were confirmed to change with @DELTA@z@sub res@, which indicated that T@sub e@ could be controlled by varying @DELTA@z@sub res@. In fact, we observed that T@sub e@ varied from 1.9 eV up to 3.5 eV with increasing the magnetic field gradient at the resonance point from 0.3 G/mm to 1.4 G/mm for N@sub 2@ plasma. The experiments on thin film deposition were also performed to investigate the relationship between T@sub e@ in the plasma and the quality of prepared films, which will be presented at the conference.