AVS 61st International Symposium & Exhibition
    Vacuum Technology Tuesday Sessions
       Session VT-TuA

Paper VT-TuA12
A Novel Vacuum Mini-Environment Design For Thin Film Sputter Deposition Apparatus

Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 6:00 pm, Room 303

Session: Vacuum Quality Analysis, Outgassing, and Control
Presenter: Jun Xie, Intevac, Inc.
Authors: X. Xie, Intevac, Inc.
R.L> Ruck, Intevac, Inc.
C. Liu, Intevac, Inc.
P. Leahey, Intevac, Inc.
T. Bluck, Intevac, Inc.
Correspondent: Click to Email
In microelectronics manufacturing, many critical process steps are carried out in high vacuum apparatus. Trace quantities of residual gaseous species, such as hydrogen and water (H2O), are always present within such system, which are of great concern to state-of-the-art device fabrication. In the hard-disk drive industry, for example, metallic thin films of a magnetic recording disk are especially susceptible to H2O, which could affect film growth adversely and compromise the device performance. It becomes a top priority to prevent the trace contaminants in the vacuum system, especially H2O, from interacting with these metallic thin films during a sputter deposition process. The goal of this study is to create a pristinely clean mini-environment inside a general vacuum apparatus for ultrapure thin film sputter deposition. The approach consists of two innovative features. The first is a retractable enclosure that seals off a volume around the sputter target and the substrate. The second is a series of pumping channels of pre-determined sizes and shapes through the wall of the enclosure that facilitate the evacuation of the gases or byproducts from the enclosure in a controlled manner while minimizing the probability of outside contaminants entering the enclosure. Experiments were conducted by sputter-depositing chromium thin films in such an enclosure to getter contaminants and assess its effectiveness with secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analysis.