• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2004.07b
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• pp.734-737
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• 2004

The metal-ferroelectric-semiconductor (MFS) structure is widely studied for nondestructive readout (NDRO) memory devices, but conventional MFS structure has a critical problem. It is difficult to obtain ferroelectric films like PZT on Si substrate without interdiffusion of impurities such as Pb, Ti and other elements. In order to solve these problems, the metal-ferroelectric-insulator-semiconductor (MFIS) structure has been proposed with a buffer layer of high dielectric constant such as MgO, $Y_2O_3$, and $CeO_2$. In this study, the etching characteristics (etch rate, selectivity) of MgO thin films were etched using $Cl_2/Ar$ plasma. The maximum etch rate of 85 nm/min for MgO thin films was obtained at $Cl_2$(30%)/Ar(70%) gas mixing ratio. Also, the etch rate was measured by varying the etching parameters such as ICP rf power, dc-bias voltage, and chamber pressure. Plasma diagnostics was performed by Langmuir probe (LP) and optical emission spectroscopy (OES).

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2010.11a
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• pp.48.1-48.1
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• 2010

Mono-crystalline silicon solar cell is fabricated by using alkali metals. These alkali metal, used in wet etching process, must be removed for the high efficiency solar cell. As wet etching process has been adapted due to its low cost. But lots of alkali metals like potassium remains on the silicon surface and acts as impurities. To remove these alkali metals many of cleaning process have to be applied when solar cell manufacturing process. In terms of alkali metal removal, modified etchant solution is required for concise cleaning process. In this paper ethylenediamine was used and proposed for the substituion of postassium hydroxide.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2014.02a
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• pp.237.1-237.1
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• 2014

Etching is one of the most important steps in semiconductor manufacturing. In etch process control a critical task is to stop the etch process when the layer to be etched has been removed. If the etch process is allowed to continue beyond this time, the material gets over-etched and the lower layer is partially removed. On the other hand if the etch process is stopped too early, part of the layer to be etched still remains, called under-etched. Endpoint detection (EPD) is used to detect the most accurate time to stop the etch process in order to avoid over or under etch. The goal of this research is to develop a hardware and software system for EPD. The hardware consists of an Optical Plasma Monitor (OPM) sensor which is used to continuously monitor the plasma optical emission intensity during the etch process. The OPM software was developed to acquire and analyze the data to perform EPD. Our EPD algorithm is based on the following theory. As the etch process starts the plasma generated in the vacuum is added with the by-products from the etch reactions on the layer being etched. As the endpoint reaches and the layer gets completely removed the plasma constituents change gradually changing the optical intensity of the plasma. Although the change in optical intensity is not apparent, the difference in the plasma constituents when the endpoint has reached leaves a unique signature in the data gathered. Though not detectable in time domain, this signature could be obscured in the frequency spectrum of the data. By filtering and analysis of the changes in the frequency spectrum before and after the endpoint we could extract this signature. In order to do that, first, the EPD algorithm converts the time series signal into frequency domain. Next the noise in the frequency spectrum is removed to look for the useful frequency constituents of the data. Once these useful frequencies have been selected, they are monitored continuously in time and using a sub-algorithm the endpoint is detected when significant changes are observed in those signals. The experiment consisted of three kinds of etch processes; ashing, SiO2 on Si etch and metal on Si etch to develop and evaluate the EPD system.

• Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Materials
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.304-307
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• 2013

Reverse engineering of semiconductor devices utilizes delayering processes, in order to identify how the interconnection lines are stacked over transistor gates. Cu metal has been used in recent fabrication technologies, and de-processes becomes more difficult with the shrinking device dimensions. In this article, reverse engineering technologies to reveal the Cu interconnection lines and Cu via-plugs embedded in dielectric layers are investigated. Stacked dielectric layers are removed by $CF_4$ plasma etching, then the exposed planar Cu metal lines and via-plugs are selectively delineated by wet chemical solution, instead of the commonly used plasma-based dry etch. As a result, we have been successful in extracting the layouts of multiple layers within a system IC, and this technique can be applicable to other logic IC, analog IC, and CMOS IC, etc.

• Journal of the Korean institute of surface engineering
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.169-172
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• 2009

We investigated the dry-etching mechanism of the TiN thin film using a $Cl_2$/Ar inductively coupled plasma system. To understand the effect of the $Cl_2$/Ar gas mixing ratio, we etched the TiN thin film by varying $Cl_2$/Ar gas mixing ratio. When the gas mixing ratio was 100% $Cl_2$, the highest etch rate was obtained. The chemical reaction on the surface was investigated with X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was used to examine etched profiles of the TiN thin film.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Surface Engineering Conference
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.63-63
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• 2003

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2008.11a
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• pp.83-83
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• 2008

Metal-oxide-silicon-on-insulator (MOSOI) structures were fabricated to study the effect caused by reactive ion etching (RIE) and sacrificial oxidation process on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) layer. The MOSOI capacitors with an etch-damaged SOI layer were characterized by capacitance-voltage (C-V) measurements and compared to the sacrificial oxidation treated samples and the reference samples without etching treatment. The measured C-V curves were compared to the numerical results from 2-dimensional (2-D) simulations. The measurements revealed that the profile of C-V curves significantly changes depending on the SOI surface condition of the MOSOI capacitors. The shift in the measured C-V curves, due to the difference of the fixed oxide charge ($Q_f$), together with the numerical simulation analysis and atomic force microscopy (AFM) analysis, allowed extracting the fixed oxide charges ($Q_f$) in the structures as well as 2-D carrier distribution profiles.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.188-192
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• 2000

In this study PZT etching was performed using planar inductively coupled Ar/Cl$_2$/BCI$_3$ plasma. The etch rate of PZT film was 2450 $\AA$/min at Ar(20)/BCl$_3$(80) gas mixing ratio and substrate temperature of 8$0^{\circ}C$. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy(XPS) analysis for films composition of etched PZT surface was utilized. The chemical bond of PbO is broken by ion bombardment and Cl radical, and the peak of metal Pb in a Pb 4f narrow scan begins to appear upon etching. As increasing additive BCl$_3$content the relative content of oxygen decreases rapidly in contrast with etch rate of PZT thin film. So we though that the etch rate of PZT thin film increased because abundant B and BCl radicals made volatile oxy-compound such as B$_{x}$/O$_{y}$ and/or BClO$_{x}$ bond. We achieved etch profile of about 80$^{\circ}$ at Ar(20)/BCl$_3$(80) gas mixing condition and substrate temperature of 8$0^{\circ}C$TEX>X>.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.8 no.5
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• pp.414-420
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• 1999

The oxide sacrificial layer technology is one of the key technologies in surface micromachining. However, the commonly used aqueous HF solutions, including the $NH_4F$ buffered HF solutions (BHF), are known to attack the Al metal layers during the oxide sacrificial etch. A mixed $NH_4F$/HF/glycerine aqueous solution of 4:1:2 ratio is known to have the best etch selectivity between oxide and AI, but even this sacrificial etchant has a significant etch rate for AI. This paper reports an extensive experimental study on various concentration ratios for HF, $NH_4F$ and glycerine, and develops the optimal mixture ratio for sacrificial etching. At the $NH_4F$/HF/glycerine ratio of 2:1:4, the etch selectivity between PSG and Al improves by approximately 6 times over the previously known best selectivity, to a value of 7,700. At this condition, the measured etch rate of PSG film is approximately $2.1\;{\mu}m/min$, which is sufficiently fast. The developed sacrificial etchant allows the addition of a Al metal layer in surface micromachining, without the worry of Al layer erosion during sacrificial etch.

• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
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• v.43 no.4
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• pp.531-536
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• 2005

Inductively coupled plasma reactive ion etching of CoTb and CoZrNb magnetic materials with the photoresist mask was performed using $Cl_2/Ar$ and $C_2F_6/Ar$ gas mixtures and characterized in terms of etch rate and etch profile. As the concentrations of $Cl_2$ and $C_2F_6$ gases increased, the etch rates of magnetic films decreased and the etch slopes became slanted. The $Cl_2/Ar$ gas was more effective in obtaining fast etch rate and steep sidewall slope than the $C_2F_6/Ar$ gas. As the coil rf power and dc bias increased, fast etch rate and steep etch slope were obtained but the redeposition on the sidewall was observed. This is due to the increase of ion and radical densities in plasma with increasing the coil rf power and the increase of incident ion energy to the substrate with increasing the dc bias voltage. By applying high density reactive ion etching to magnetic tunnel junction stack containing various magnetic films and metal oxide, steep etch slope and clean etch profile without redeposition were obtained.