• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2012.02a
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• pp.434-435
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• 2012

Plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) silicon dioxide thin films have many applications in semiconductor manufacturing such as inter-level dielectric and gate dielectric metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFETs). Fundamental chemical reaction for the formation of SiO2 includes SiH4 and O2, but mixture of SiH4 and N2O is preferable because of lower hydrogen concentration in the deposited film [1]. It is also known that binding energy of N-N is higher than that of N-O, so the particle generation by molecular reaction can be reduced by reducing reactive nitrogen during the deposition process. However, nitrous oxide (N2O) gives rise to nitric oxide (NO) on reaction with oxygen atoms, which in turn reacts with ozone. NO became a greenhouse gas which is naturally occurred regulating of stratospheric ozone. In fact, it takes global warming effect about 300 times higher than carbon dioxide (CO2). Industries regard that N2O is inevitable for their device fabrication; however, it is worthwhile to develop a marginable nitrous oxide free process for university lab classes considering educational and environmental purpose. In this paper, we developed environmental friendly and material cost efficient SiO2 deposition process by substituting N2O with O2 targeting university hands-on laboratory course. Experiment was performed by two level statistical design of experiment (DOE) with three process parameters including RF power, susceptor temperature, and oxygen gas flow. Responses of interests to optimize the process were deposition rate, film uniformity, surface roughness, and electrical dielectric property. We observed some power like particle formation on wafer in some experiment, and we postulate that the thermal and electrical energy to dissociate gas molecule was relatively lower than other runs. However, we were able to find a marginable process region with less than 3% uniformity requirement in our process optimization goal. Surface roughness measured by atomic force microscopy (AFM) presented some evidence of the agglomeration of silane related particles, and the result was still satisfactory for the purpose of this research. This newly developed SiO2 deposition process is currently under verification with repeated experimental run on 4 inches wafer, and it will be adopted to Semiconductor Material and Process course offered in the Department of Electronic Engineering at Myongji University from spring semester in 2012.

• Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Materials
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.35-39
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• 2009

A novel Helmholtz coil inductively coupled plasma(H-ICP) etcher is proposed and characterized for deep nano-scale CMOS technology. Various hardware tests are performed while varying key parameters such as distance between the top and bottom coils, the distance between the chamber ceiling and the wafer, and the chamber height in order to determine the optimal design of the chamber and optimal process conditions. The uniformity was significantly improved by applying the optimum conditions. The plasma density obtained with the H-ICP source was about $5{\times}10^{11}/cm^3$, and the electron temperature was about 2-3 eV. The etching selectivity for the poly-silicon gate versus the ultra-thin gate oxide was 482:1 at 10 sccm of $HeO_2$. The proposed H-ICP was successfully applied to form multiple 60-nm poly-silicon gate layers.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2004.11a
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• pp.276-279
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• 2004

Plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) of silicon nitride (SiN) is a proven technique for obtaining layers that meet the needs of surface passivation and anti-reflection coating. In addition, the deposition process appears to provoke bulk passivation as well due to diffusion of atomic hydrogen. This bulk passivation is an important advantage of PECVD deposition when compared to the conventional CVD techniques. A further advantage of PECVD is that the process takes place at a relatively low temperature of 300t, keeping the total thermal budget of the cell processing to a minimum. In this work SiN deposition was performed using a horizontal PECVD reactor system consisting of a long horizontal quartz tube that was radiantly heated. Special and long rectangular graphite plates served as both the electrodes to establish the plasma and holders of the wafers. The electrode configuration was designed to provide a uniform plasma environment for each wafer and to ensure the film uniformity. These horizontally oriented graphite electrodes were stacked parallel to one another, side by side, with alternating plates serving as power and ground electrodes for the RF power supply. The plasma was formed in the space between each pair of plates. Also this paper deals with the fabrication of multicrystalline silicon solar cells with PECVD SiN layers combined with high-throughput screen printing and RTP firing. Using this sequence we were able to obtain solar cells with an efficiency of 14% for polished multi crystalline Si wafers of size 125 m square.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.36 no.11
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• pp.1135-1140
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• 2012

Two-step metallization processes have been proposed to achieve high-efficiency silicon solar cells, where the front-side grids are formed by silver plating after the formation of a nickel seed layer with a mask. Because the conventional mask patterning process is performed by an expensive selective printing method using either UV resist or phase change ink, however, the combination of a simple coating and laser-selective ablation processes is proposed in this study as an alternative means. As a masking material, the solar cell wafer was coated with either inexpensive wax having a low melting temperature or a fluorocarbon solution, and then, an electrode image was patterned by selectively removing the masking material using the laser. It was found that the fluorocarbon coating was not only superior to the wax coating in terms of pattern uniformity but it also increased the efficiency of the solar cell by 0.16%, as confirmed by statistical f and t tests.