AVS 62nd International Symposium & Exhibition
    Plasma Science and Technology Thursday Sessions
       Session PS-ThA

Paper PS-ThA10
Insights to Scaling Remote Plasma Sources Sustained in NF3 Mixtures

Thursday, October 22, 2015, 5:20 pm, Room 210A

Session: Plasma Sources
Presenter: Shuo Huang, University of Michigan
Authors: S. Huang, University of Michigan
V. Volynets, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Republic of Korea
S. Lee, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Republic of Korea
I.-C. Song, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Republic of Korea
S. Lu, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Republic of Korea
J.R. Hamilton, University College London, UK
J. Tennyson, University College London, UK
M.J. Kushner, University of Michigan
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Remote plasma sources (RPS) are used in microelectronics fabrication to produce fluxes of radicals for etching and surface passivation in the absence of damage to devices that may occur by charging and energetic ion bombardment. RPS reactors use distance, grids or other discriminating barriers to reduce or eliminate charged particle fluxes from reaching the surface of the material being treated. Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) is often used in RPS due to the efficiency with which F atoms are produced by dissociative attachment. RPS sustained in NF3 gas mixtures, such as Ar/NF3/O2 increases the variety of reactive species produced, for example, NxOy. For certain applications it may be desirable to separately optimize, for example, F atom fluxes; and O atoms, or NxOy. This separate optimization could, in principle, be performed using pulsed power or pulsed gas sources. In this paper, we report on a computational investigation of RPS sustained in different NF3 containing gas mixtures using pulsed power for low-damage plasma etching applications. Two modelling approaches were used – global modelling to investigate fundamental reaction mechanisms and 2-dimensional modelling to address the spatial dynamics of flow. A reaction mechanism was developed for plasmas sustained in mixtures containing Ar/NF3/N2/O2. Cross sections for NFx were generated using ab initio computational techniques based on the molecular R-matrix method. Results for RPS produced by both continuous wave power and pulsed power will be discussed, and comparisons made to experiments.