AVS 52nd International Symposium
    Exhibitor Workshop Tuesday Sessions
       Session EW-TuL

Paper EW-TuL2
Seal Life Test of 300mm Hybrid Chamber in PVD Thermal Cycle Environment

Tuesday, November 1, 2005, 12:20 pm, Room Exhibit Hall C&D

Session: Vacuum Components and Measurement Optimization
Presenter: J. Zhou, Applied Materials
Authors: J. Zhou, Applied Materials
M. Evans, Applied Materials
J. Klein, Applied Materials
J. Vargas, Applied Materials
Y. Zhou, Applied Materials
R. Schmieding, Applied Materials
H. Gao, Applied Materials
D. Paul, Applied Materials
B. Stimson, Applied Materials
Correspondent: Click to Email
Physical vapor deposition (PVD) is a key process in semiconductor wafer manufacturing. A new 300mm PVD chamber design consists of two pieces: an aluminum chamber body and a stainless steel bottom plate with a Viton O-ring seal. The reliability of the bottom seal is a concern, as elevated temperature exposure may cause the O-ring to fail by heat hardening, reducing equipment uptime. Thus, an accelerated test was designed to evaluate the O-ring lifetime before vacuum leakage. In commercial use, 300mm wafer diameter PVD chambers need to be heated for three hours at 80% lamp power about once a week. Tests were conducted with: 1) 100% lamp power during heating; 2) tight vacuum pass/fail criterion; 3) increased temperature in one of the test chambers than the default 96°C setting to look at worst case. Each thermal cycle consisted of three-hour heating and three-hour cooldown. After every 10 cycles the test chambers were cooled below 40°C to obtain the specified vacuum. Seal leakage was evaluated every 20 cycles using an in situ gas analyzer. Test chambers passed 520 thermal cycles without measurable vacuum degradation. Assuming 52 thermal cycles are equivalent to one year of seal life, the test chambers were demonstrated to have a "thermal equivalent" seal life of 10 years, which is much longer than the design goal of five years. The test results, together with post-test O-ring FTIR analysis, provide high confidence in O-ring reliability, and establish a methodology to evaluate PVD chamber seal life.