Research to Achieve Uniform Plasma in Multi-ground Capacitive Coupled Plasma

The capacitive coupled plasma is used widely in the semiconductor industries. Especially, the uniformity of the industrial plasma is heavily related with defect ratio of devices. Therefore, the industries need the capacitive coupled plasma source which can generate the uniform plasma and control the plasma's uniformity. To achieving the uniformity of the large area plasma, we designed multi-powered electrodes. We controlled the uniformity by controlling the power of each electrode. After this work, we started to research another concept of the plasma device. We make the plasma chamber that has multi-ground electrodes imaginary (CST microwave studio) and simulate the electric field. The shape of the multi-ground electrodes is ring type, and it is same as the shape of the multi-power electrodes that we researched before. The diameter of the side electrode's edge is 300mm. We assumed that the plasma uniformity is related with the impedance of ground electrodes. Therefore we simulated the imaginary chamber in three cases. First, we connected L (inductor) and C (capacitor) at the center of multi-ground electrodes. Second, we changed electric conductivity of multi-ground electrode. Third, we changed the insulator's thickness between the center ground electrode and the side ground electrode. The driving frequency is 2, 13.56 and 100 MHz. We switched our multi-powered electrode system to multi-ground electrode system. After switching, we measured the plasma uniformity after installing a variable vacuum capacitor at the ground line. We investigate the effect of ground electrodes' impedance to plasma uniformity.