Real-Time Plasma Process Monitoring with Impedance Analysis and Optical Emission Spectroscopy

Plasma is widely used in various commercial etchers and chemical vapor deposition. Unfortunately, real-time plasma process monitoring is still difficult. Some methods of plasma diagnosis is improved, however, it is possible for real-time plasma diagnosis to use non-intrusive probe only. In this research, the object is to investigate the suitability of using impedance analysis and optical emission spectroscopy (OES) for real-time plasma process monitoring. It is assumed that plasma system is a equivalent circuit. Therefore, V-I probe is used for measuring impedance, which can be a new non-intrusive probe for plasma diagnosis. From impedance data, we tried to analyse physical properties of plasma. And OES, the other method of plasma diagnosis, is a typical non-intrusive probe for analyzing chemical properties. The amount of the OES data is typically large, so this poses a difficulty in extracting relevant information. To solve this problem, principal component analysis (PCA) can be used. For fundamental information, Ar plasma and $O_2$ plasma are used in this experiment. This method can be applied to real-time endpoint and fault detections.