Incipient Fault Detection of Reactive Ion Etching Process

In order to achieve timely and accurate fault detection of plasma etching process, neural network based time series modeling has been applied to reactive ion etching (RIE) using two different in-situ plasma-monitoring sensors called optical emission spectroscopy (OES) and residual gas analyzer (RGA). Four different subsystems of RIE (such as RF power, chamber pressure, and two gas flows) were considered as potential sources of fault, and multiple degrees of faults were tested. OES and RGA data were simultaneously collected while the etching of benzocyclobutene (BCB) in a $SF_6/O_2$ plasma was taking place. To simulate established TSNNs as incipient fault detectors, each TSNN was trained to learn the parameters at t, t+T, ... , and t+4T. This prediction scheme could effectively compensate run-time-delay (RTD) caused by data preprocessing and computation. Satisfying results are presented in this paper, and it turned out that OES is more sensitive to RF power and RGA is to chamber pressure and gas flows. Therefore, the combination of these two sensors is recommended for better fault detection, and they show a potential to the applications of not only incipient fault detection but also incipient real-time diagnosis.