AVS 63rd International Symposium & Exhibition
    Plasma Science and Technology Thursday Sessions
       Session PS-ThA

Paper PS-ThA7
Temporal Evolution of Surface Chemistry in Ion and Radical Dominated Etch of Hydrocarbon Polymers

Thursday, November 10, 2016, 4:20 pm, Room 104B

Session: Plasma Chemistry and Plasma Surface Interactions
Presenter: Barton Lane, Tokyo Electron America, Inc.
Authors: B.G. Lane, Tokyo Electron America, Inc.
P. Ventzek, Tokyo Electron America, Inc.
N. Eibagi, Tokyo Electron America, Inc.
A. Ranjan, TEL Technology Center, America, LLC
V. Rastogi, TEL Technology Center, America, LLC
Correspondent: Click to Email
Precise and selective etching requires the control of the chemical and physical nature of thin surface layers. We discuss here the specific example of hydrocarbon polymer etching in an argon/oxygen chemistry. An important issue is the temporal evolution of the layer started from an initial condition established by a preceding step. It is important to ascertain whether the surfaces evolve continuously or not. We find for this chemistry and film set, that there are transients which give way at longer times to steady state conditions. Through the use of a novel in situ OES based technique which mimics traditional SIMS surface analysis we demonstrate the time dependent effect of argon ions on a hydrocarbon polymer surface which has been previously oxidized and separately the re-oxidation of a previously graphitized surface. Both these processes show sharp transients followed by much less active steady states. We characterize how these transients depend on the starting surface condition. We apply these same analytic techniques to the more complicated situation of the time evolution of photoresist lines which have been defined by 193i lithography. We show that the time dependence of the morphology of the surfaces of these lines which can be related to the lamellar structure of the photoresist.