• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
• /
• 2014.02a
• /
• pp.381.1-381.1
• /
• 2014

In this study, we investigated the deposition behavior and the etch resistivity of plasma polymerized carbon hardmask (ppCHM) film with the variation of process temperature. The etch resistivity of deposited ppCHM film was analyzed by thickness measurement before and after direct contact reactive ion etching process. The physical and chemical properties of films were characterized on the Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscope, Raman spectroscope, stress gauge, and ellipsometry. The deposition behavior of ppCHM process with the variation of temperature was correlated refractive index (n), extinction coefficient (k), intrinsic stress (MPa), and deposition rate (A/s) with the hydrocarbon concentration, graphite (G) and disordered (D) peak by analyzing the Raman and FT-IR spectrum. From this experiment we knew an optimal deposition condition for structure of carbon hardmask with the higher etch selectivity to oxide. It was shown the density of ppCHM film had 1.6~1.9 g/cm3 and its refractive index was 1.8~1.9 at process temperature, $300{\sim}600^{\circ}C$. The etch selectivity of ppCHM film was shown about 1:4~1:8 to undoped siliconoxide (USG) film (etch rate, 1300 A/min).

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
• /
• v.24 no.9
• /
• pp.687-692
• /
• 2011

Hafnium oxide ($HfO_2$) was very advantageous for substitute material of gate on existing transistor. $HfO_2$ has been widely studied due to high contact with polysilicon and thermal stability and also, it is easily etched by using HF solution. In this study, $HfO_2$ and thermal oxide films were etched by wet etch method using chemical etchant. Etch rate of $HfO_2$ and thermal oxide was linearly increased with increasing concentration of HF and temperature but etch rate of $HfO_2$ was higher than thermal oxide due to $H^+$, $F^-$, and $HF_2^-$ ions at below 0.5% concentration of HF. And also, etch selectivity was improved by adding Hydrazine as additive.

• Korean Journal of Materials Research
• /
• v.5 no.2
• /
• pp.208-214
• /
• 1995

In order to study on the penetrations of HF solution acording to the geometrical shrinkage of contact-hole pattern size, the wet etch characteristics for oxide in microchannel patterns was investigated. Microchannel patterns of LPCVD oxide surrounded by nitride film, with dimensions of 0.1~1$\mu\textrm{m}$ height and 0.1~20$\mu\textrm{m}$, width, were fabricated. And the etch rates of oxide in HF solution were observed. It was found that oxide etch rate for micro-channel patterns in HF was not affected by pattern sizes and initial aspect ratios up to $0.1 \times 0.1 \mu \textrm{m}^{2} size and 1.2$\mu\textrm{m}$ depth. Finally, it was concluded that there were no special limitations for penetrations of HF solution in wet processes according to the geometrical shrinkage of contact-hole pattern size.

• 한국정보디스플레이학회:학술대회논문집
• /
• 2009.10a
• /
• pp.1399-1401
• /
• 2009

In this article, we reported the results of etching polymonochloro-para-xylylene (parylene-C) thin films using inductively coupled plasma and $CF_4/O_2$ gas mixture. The $CF_4$ gas fraction increased up to the approximately 16 %, the polymer etch rate increased in the range of 277 - 373 nm/min. It confirmed that the etch rate of the parylene-C mainly depended on the O radical density in the plasma. Using a contact angle measurement, the contact angle increased with increasing the $CF_4$ fraction. Moreover, the contact angle was highly related a $CF_x$ functional group on parylene films.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
• /
• 2004.08c
• /
• pp.460-462
• /
• 2004

The control of the data retention time is a main issue for realizing future high density dynamic random access memory. There are several leakage current mechanisms in which the stored data disappears. The mechanisms of data disappear is as follow, 1 )Junction leakage current between the junction, 2) Junction leakage current from the capacitor node contact, 3)Sub-threshold leakage current if the transfer transistor is affected by gate etch damage etc. In this paper we showed the plasma edge damage effect to find out data retention time effectiveness. First we measured the transistor characteristics of forward and reverse bias. And junction leakage characteristics are measured with/without plasma damage by HP4145. Finally, we showed the comparison TRET with etch damage, damage_cure_RTP and hydrogen_treatment. As a result, hydrogen_treatment is superior than any other method in a curing plasma etch damage side.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
• /
• 2016.02a
• /
• pp.371.2-371.2
• /
• 2016

Graphene electronics is one of the promising technologies for the next generation electronic devices due to the outstanding properties such as conductivity, high carrier mobility, mechanical, and optical properties along with extended applications using 2 dimensional heterostructures. However, large contact resistance between metal and graphene is one of the major obstacles for commercial application of graphene electronics. In order to achieve low contact resistance, numerous researches have been conducted such as gentle plasma treatment, ultraviolet ozone (UVO) treatment, annealing treatment, and one-dimensional graphene edge contact. In this report, we suggest a fabrication method of one-dimensional graphene metal edge contact without using graphene exfoliation. Graphene is grown on Cu foil by low pressure chemical vapor deposition. Then, the graphene is transferred on $SiO_2/Si$ wafer. The patterning of graphene channel and metal electrode is done by photolithography. $O_2$ plasma is applied to etch out the exposed graphene and then Ti/Au is deposited. As a result, the one-dimensional edge contact geometry is built between metal and graphene. The contact resistance of the fabricated one-dimensional metal-graphene edge contact is compared with the contact resistance of vertically stacked conventional metal-graphene contact.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
• /
• 2015.08a
• /
• pp.142.2-142.2
• /
• 2015

Plasma etch endpoint detection (EPD) of SiO2 and PR layer is demonstrated by plasma impedance monitoring in this work. Plasma etching process is the core process for making fine pattern devices in semiconductor fabrication, and the etching endpoint detection is one of the essential FDC (Fault Detection and Classification) for yield management and mass production. In general, Optical emission spectrocopy (OES) has been used to detect endpoint because OES can be a simple, non-invasive and real-time plasma monitoring tool. In OES, the trend of a few sensitive wavelengths is traced. However, in case of small-open area etch endpoint detection (ex. contact etch), it is at the boundary of the detection limit because of weak signal intensities of reaction reactants and products. Furthemore, the various materials covering the wafer such as photoresist (PR), dielectric materials, and metals make the analysis of OES signals complicated. In this study, full spectra of optical emission signals were collected and the data were analyzed by a data-mining approach, modified K-means cluster analysis. The K-means cluster analysis is modified suitably to analyze a thousand of wavelength variables from OES. This technique can improve the sensitivity of EPD for small area oxide layer etching processes: about 1.0 % oxide area. This technique is expected to be applied to various plasma monitoring applications including fault detections as well as EPD.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
• /
• 2012.02a
• /
• pp.433-433
• /
• 2012

As the requirement in patterning geometry continuously shrinks down, the termination of etch process at the exact time became crucial for the success in nano patterning technology. By virtue of real-time optical emission spectroscopy (OES), etch end point detection (EPD) technique continuously develops; however, it also faced with difficulty in low open ratio etching, typically in self aligned contact (SAC) and one cylinder contact (OCS), because of very small amount of optical emission from by-product gas species in the bulk plasma glow discharge. In developing etching process, one may observe that coupon test is being performed. It consumes costs and time for preparing the patterned sample wafers every test in priority, so the coupon wafer test instead of the whole patterned wafer is beneficial for testing and developing etch process condition. We also can observe that etch open area is varied with the number of coupons on a dummy wafer. However, this can be a misleading in OES study. If the coupon wafer test are monitored using OES, we can conjecture the endpoint by experienced method, but considering by data, the materials for residual area by being etched open area are needed to consider. In this research, we compare and analysis the OES data for coupon wafer test results for monitoring about the conditions that the areas except the patterns on the coupon wafers for real-time process monitoring. In this research, we compared two cases, first one is etching the coupon wafers attached on the carrier wafer that is covered by the photoresist, and other case is etching the coupon wafers on the chuck. For comparing the emission intensity, we chose the four chemical species (SiF2, N2, CO, CN), and for comparing the etched profile, measured by scanning electron microscope (SEM). In addition, we adopted the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm for analyzing the chose OES data patterns, and analysis the covariance and coefficient for statistical method. After the result, coupon wafers are over-etched for without carrier wafer groups, while with carrier wafer groups are under-etched. And the CN emission intensity has significant difference compare with OES raw data. Based on these results, it necessary to reasonable analysis of the OES data to adopt the pre-data processing and algorithms, and the result will influence the reliability for relation of coupon wafer test and whole wafer test.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
• /
• 2012.08a
• /
• pp.80-81
• /
• 2012

Recently, one of the critical issues in the etching processes of the nanoscale devices is to achieve ultra-high aspect ratio contact (UHARC) profile without anomalous behaviors such as sidewall bowing, and twisting profile. To achieve this goal, the fluorocarbon plasmas with major advantage of the sidewall passivation have been used commonly with numerous additives to obtain the ideal etch profiles. However, they still suffer from formidable challenges such as tight limits of sidewall bowing and controlling the randomly distorted features in nanoscale etching profile. Furthermore, the absence of the available plasma simulation tools has made it difficult to develop revolutionary technologies to overcome these process limitations, including novel plasma chemistries, and plasma sources. As an effort to address these issues, we performed a fluorocarbon surface kinetic modeling based on the experimental plasma diagnostic data for silicon dioxide etching process under inductively coupled C4F6/Ar/O2 plasmas. For this work, the SiO2 etch rates were investigated with bulk plasma diagnostics tools such as Langmuir probe, cutoff probe and Quadruple Mass Spectrometer (QMS). The surface chemistries of the etched samples were measured by X-ray Photoelectron Spectrometer. To measure plasma parameters, the self-cleaned RF Langmuir probe was used for polymer deposition environment on the probe tip and double-checked by the cutoff probe which was known to be a precise plasma diagnostic tool for the electron density measurement. In addition, neutral and ion fluxes from bulk plasma were monitored with appearance methods using QMS signal. Based on these experimental data, we proposed a phenomenological, and realistic two-layer surface reaction model of SiO2 etch process under the overlying polymer passivation layer, considering material balance of deposition and etching through steady-state fluorocarbon layer. The predicted surface reaction modeling results showed good agreement with the experimental data. With the above studies of plasma surface reaction, we have developed a 3D topography simulator using the multi-layer level set algorithm and new memory saving technique, which is suitable in 3D UHARC etch simulation. Ballistic transports of neutral and ion species inside feature profile was considered by deterministic and Monte Carlo methods, respectively. In case of ultra-high aspect ratio contact hole etching, it is already well-known that the huge computational burden is required for realistic consideration of these ballistic transports. To address this issue, the related computational codes were efficiently parallelized for GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) computing, so that the total computation time could be improved more than few hundred times compared to the serial version. Finally, the 3D topography simulator was integrated with ballistic transport module and etch reaction model. Realistic etch-profile simulations with consideration of the sidewall polymer passivation layer were demonstrated.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
• /
• v.20 no.3
• /
• pp.27-31
• /
• 2021

VI probe, which is one of various in-situ plasma monitoring sensor, is frequently used for in-situ process monitoring in mass production environment. In this paper, we correlated the plasma etch results with VI probe data with the small amount of gas flow rate changes to propose usefulness of the VI probe in real-time process monitoring. Several different sized contact holes were employed for the etch experiment, and the etched profiles were measured by scanning electron microscope (SEM). Although the shape of etched hole did not show satisfactory relationship with VI probe data, the chamber status changed along the incremental/decremental modification of the amount of gas flow was successfully observed in terms of impedance monitoring.