A Study on The Improvement of Profile Tilting or Bottom Distortion in HARC

The etching technology of the high aspect ratio contact(HARC) is necessary at the critical contact processes of semiconductor devices. Etching the $SiO_{2}$ contact hole with the sub-micron design rule in manufacturing VLSI devices, the unexpected phenomenon of 'profile tilting' or 'bottom distortion' is often observed. This makes a short circuit between neighboring contact holes, which causes to drop seriously the device yield. As the aspect ratio of contact holes increases, the high C/F ratio gases, $C_{4}F_{6}$, $C_{4}F_{8}$ and $C_{5}F_{8}$, become widely used in order to minimize the mask layer loss during the etching process. These gases provide abundant fluorocarbon polymer as well as high selectivity to the mask layer, and the polymer with high sticking yield accumulates at the top-wall of the contact hole. During the etch process, many electrons are accumulated around the asymmetric hole mouth to distort the electric field, and this distorts the ion trajectory arriving at the hole bottom. These ions with the distorted trajectory induce the deformation of the hole bottom, which is called 'profile tilting' or 'bottom distortion'. To prevent this phenomenon, three methods are suggested here. 1) Using lower C/F ratio gases, $CF_{4}$ or $C_{3}F_{8}$, the amount of the Polymer at the hole mouth is reduced to minimize the asymmetry of the hole top. 2) The number of the neighboring holes with equal distance is maximized to get the more symmetry of the oxygen distribution around the hole. 3) The dual frequency plasma source is used to release the excessive charge build-up at the hole mouth. From the suggested methods, we have obtained the nearly circular hole bottom, which Implies that the ion trajectory Incident on the hole bottom is symmetry.

높은 A/R의 콘택 산화막 에칭에서 바닥모양 변형 개선에 관한 연구