• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2010.08a
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• pp.281-281
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• 2010

Very low refractive index (<1.4) materials have been proved to be the key factor improving the performance of various optical components, such as reflectors, filters, photonic crystals, LEDs, and solar cell. Highly porous SiO2 are logically designed for ultralow refractive index materials because of the direct relation between porosity and index of refraction. Among them, ordered macroporous SiO2 is of potential material since their theoretically low refractive index ~1.10. However, in the conventional synthesis of ordered macroporous SiO2, the time required for the crystallization of organic nanoparticles, such as polystyrene (PS), from colloidal solution into well ordered template is typical long (several days for 1 cm substrate) due to the low interaction between particles and particle - substrate. In this study, polystyrene - polyacrylic acid (PS-AA) nanoparticles synthesized by miniemulsion polymerization method have hydrophilic polyacrylic acid tails on the surface of particles which increase the interaction between particle and with substrate giving rise to the formation of PS-AA film by simply spin - coating method. Less ordered with controlled thickness films of PS-AA on silicon wafer were successfully fabricated by changing the spinning speed or concentration of colloidal solution, as confirmed by FE-SEM. Based on these template films, a series of macroporous SiO2 films whose thicknesses varied from 300nm to ~1000nm were fabricated either by conventional sol - gel infiltration or gas phase deposition followed by thermal removal of organic template. Formations of SiO2 films consist of interconnected air balls with size ~100 nm were confirmed by FE-SEM and TEM. These highly porous SiO2 show very low refractive indices (<1.18) over a wide range of wavelength (from 200 to 1000nm) as shown by SE measurement. Refraction indices of SiO2 films at 633nm reported here are of ~1.10 which, to our best knowledge, are among the lowest values having been announced.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2010.02a
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• pp.464-464
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• 2010

A few years ago, for maintaining high stability and production yield of production equipment in a semiconductor fab, on-line monitoring of wafers is required, so that semiconductor manufacturers are investigating a software based process controlling scheme known as virtual metrology (VM). As semiconductor technology develops, the cost of fabrication tool/facility has reached its budget limit, and reducing metrology cost can obviously help to keep semiconductor manufacturing cost. By virtue of prediction, VM enables wafer-level control (or even down to site level), reduces within-lot variability, and increases process capability, $C_{pk}$. In this research, we have practiced VM on $SiO_2$ etch rate with optical emission spectroscopy(OES) data acquired in-situ while the process parameters are simultaneously correlated. To build process model of $SiO_2$ via, we first performed a series of etch runs according to the statistically designed experiment, called design of experiments (DOE). OES data are automatically logged with etch rate, and some OES spectra that correlated with $SiO_2$ etch rate is selected. Once the feature of OES data is selected, the preprocessed OES spectra is then used for in-situ sensor based VM modeling. ICP-RIE using 葰.56MHz, manufactured by Plasmart, Ltd. is employed in this experiment, and single fiber-optic attached for in-situ OES data acquisition. Before applying statistical feature selection, empirical feature selection of OES data is initially performed in order not to fall in a statistical misleading, which causes from random noise or large variation of insignificantly correlated responses with process itself. The accuracy of the proposed VM is still need to be developed in order to successfully replace the existing metrology, but it is no doubt that VM can support engineering decision of "go or not go" in the consecutive processing step.