Microelectronic devices are often exposed to radiation and charged-particle bombardment from processing plasmas during their fabrication stages often resulting in damage to the dielectric materials. This work investigates the effectiveness of capillary-array windows to partially block charged particles in order to distinguish the effects of photons and charged particle bombardment during plasma exposure. A capillary-array window is placed over a 1×1 cm2 exposed area of an aluminum wafer chuck [i] in an ECR reactor and the substrate current during plasma exposure is measured at different bias voltages with and without the capillary window in order to determine the effectiveness of the window to partially block charged particles. Additionally, using an Object-Oriented-Particle-in-cell (OOPIC) code [ii], the ion and electron fluxes passing through the window can be estimated. The experimental measurements and the simulation results confirm that the capillary-array window can be arranged to block almost all ions during plasma exposure.

 

This work has been supported by Semiconductor Research Corporation under Contact No. 2008-KJ-1871 and the National Science Foundation under Grant CBET-1066231.

 

[i] T. Lucatorto, T. J. Mcllrath, and J. R. Roberts, Appl. Opt. 18, 2505 (1979)

[ii]Y. M. Sung, M. Wada, M. Otsubo, C. Honda, Y. K. Kim, and C. H., J. Appl. Phys. 43 800 (2004)