AVS 52nd International Symposium
    Plasma Science and Technology Thursday Sessions
       Session PS-ThM

Paper PS-ThM9
Nanoscale Plasma Processing of Substrates Using Moving Patterned Shutter

Thursday, November 3, 2005, 11:00 am, Room 304

Session: Plasma-Surface Interactions II
Presenter: X. Hua, University of Maryland
Authors: X. Hua, University of Maryland
G.S. Oehrlein, University of Maryland
P. Lazzeri, ITC-irst, Italy
M. Anderle, ITC-irst, Italy
Correspondent: Click to Email
Future nanoscale device fabrication may require the ability to add or remove controllably layers of several nanometers using plasma processes. For such processes, the total length of the substrate-plasma interaction time decreases to a few seconds and less. For short plasma-substrate interaction times, transient plasma effects, e.g. electrical matching and plasma stabilization, plasma-wall interactions, etc., play a more important role than for longer plasma processes, and reduce our ability to control the plasma induced modification of a substrate. In this presentation, we describe the concept of a moving shutter containing slits in close contact with a substrate to control the interaction time of well-established gas discharges with the substrate for nanoscale layer/nanostructure processing. Both substrate and shutter are located on the RF powered electrode and can be biased relative to the plasma. Once the plasma density, discharge chemistry, and the electrode bias voltage are fully established, the shutter with slits begins to move at a controlled speed across the initially covered substrate and exposes the substrate for the desired interaction time to the plasma. We will show that this technique enables precise nanoscale layer etching or deposition on both blanket and patterned substrates employing gas discharges. Applications of this approach to nanoscale plasma processing of ultra low k materials and surface modifications of advanced photoresist materials are reviewed.