Use of In-Situ Optical Emission Spectroscopy for Leak Fault Detection and Classification in Plasma Etching

In-situ optical emission spectroscopy (OES) is employed for leak detection in plasma etching system. A misprocessing is reported for significantly reduced silicon etch rate with chlorine gas, and OES is used as a supplementary sensor to analyze the gas phase species that reside in the process chamber. Potential cause of misprocessing reaches to chamber O-ring wear out, MFC leaks, and/or leak at gas delivery line, and experiments are performed to funnel down the potential of the cause. While monitoring the plasma chemistry of the process chamber using OES, the emission trace for nitrogen species is observed at the chlorine gas supply. No trace of nitrogen species is found in other than chlorine gas supply, and we found that the amount of chlorine gas is slightly fluctuating. We successfully found the root cause of the reported misprocessing which may jeopardize the quality of thin film processing. Based on a quantitative analysis of the amount of nitrogen observed in the chamber, we conclude that the source of the leak is the fitting of the chlorine mass flow controller with the amount of around 2-5 sccm.