Invited Paper PS2-WeA1
Possible Applications of Neutral Beam Generated by Low Angle Reflection of a Reactive Ion Beam to Nanoscale Semiconductor Processing
Wednesday, October 20, 2010, 2:00 pm, Room Galisteo
Reactive ion etching (RIE) is one of the key technologies in the fabrication of deep submicrometre silicon-based integrated circuits. However, conventional RIE techniques can have serious disadvantages for future device fabrication due to charged particles and UV photons causing increased gate oxide breakdown, charging, etc. It is believed that these problems will become more serious as the critical dimensions of the device shrink to a few nanometres size. Therefore, there is a need to develop novel semiconductor processing equipment and processing techniques that can cope with the issues caused by the integration of future semiconductor devices and the decrease in the design rule to the sub-nano scale. One of the methods being investigated by many researchers is etching using a reactive neutral beam.
This presentation introduces a neutral beam generated by surface neutralization of an ion beam using a low angle forward reflection technique and explains its possible application to various areas such as surface treatment and etching. When a metal-oxide-semiconductor device was etched using a reactive neutral beam instead of conventional reactive ion etching, it was confirmed that charge-related problems such as aspect-ratio-dependent etching and gate oxide charging could be removed. Neutral beams can be beneficial to the fabrication of other devices such as the III-V devices, SOI devices, etc