AVS 65th International Symposium & Exhibition
    Plasma Science and Technology Division Monday Sessions
       Session PS+TF-MoM

Paper PS+TF-MoM6
Characterization of Inductively Coupled Plasma Source for Plasma Enhanced Atomic Layer Deposition

Monday, October 22, 2018, 10:00 am, Room 104C

Session: Plasma Deposition and Plasma-Enhanced ALD
Presenter: Premkumar Panneerchelvam, KLA-Tencor
Authors: P. Panneerchelvam, KLA-Tencor
A. Agarwal, KLA-Tencor
D.R. Boris, Naval Research Laboratory
S.G. Walton, Naval Research Laboratory
Correspondent: Click to Email
Plasma enhanced atomic layer deposition (PEALD) is a technique which provides an efficient alternative to thermal ALD systems by enabling low-temperature wafer processing using energetic and reactive plasma species. Utilization of plasma sources to drive atomic layer deposition stems from the ability to generate active radicals which are more reactive than molecular precursors used in thermal ALD processes. Aside from the fact that plasma processing systems are already utilized in semiconductor manufacturing, PEALD affords significant advantages over thermal ALD processing such as lower temperature processing coupled with active tuning of film properties, wafer level uniformity control, wider variety of film growth, and conformality. Remote inductively coupled plasma (ICP) sources are a common choice for PEALD as they enable high density discharges which efficiently generate reactive neutral species. Characterization of these plasma sources is important in understanding the properties of the species incident on the wafer to not only tailor the chamber architecture but also understand the role of different radicals in the plasma in the surface mechanism.

In this work, we will discuss characterization of a reactor that imitates an industrial PEALD tool using experimental and computational investigations. The system is flowing afterglow geometry, where a barrel-type ICP source is mounted on one side of the reactor and produces a plasma that expands into a chamber with access ports to diagnose the plasma properties using optical emission spectroscopy and charged particle flux probes. The computational model is based on a multi-species, two-temperature fluid description of plasma with finite rate chemistry. Results will be discussed in Ar and Ar/N2 plasmas over varying pressure and inductive power with particular emphasis on the impact of N2 addition on plasma properties and the chemical composition of radicals incident on the wafer.

*This work was partially supported by the Naval Research Laboratory base program.