A Planar High Power Xenon Excimer Lamp for Materials and Device Processing

"This phase I small business innovation research will explore the feasibility of developing a planar xenon excimer lamp for the demanding requirements of the semiconductor manufacturing and materials processing industry. Emerging process applications notrequiring a coherent source include in-situ UV reticle cleaning for 157 nm lithography and in-situ pre-deposition cleaning. Conventional UV lamps are inadequate for the task . Excimer lasers cannot conveniently illuminate a large field size, are oftendifficult to integrate into a production tool, and have a very high cost of ownership. This phase I research will be directed toward establishing the feasibility of developing a planar xenon excimer lamp with an irradiance of 100 mW/cm2. We haveestablished three goals to guide our work in phase I: 1) design and fabricate a planar excimer lamp with a single substrate electrode structure, 2) evaluate the emission uniformity of the lamp filled with pure Xenon (172 nm), and 3) measure the UVspectra and radiant power output of the lamp. Excimer lamps can be designed to operate with a number of different excimer gas mixtures including Ar* (126 nm), Kr* (146 nm), Xe* (172 nm), KrCl*(222 nm), and XeCl (308 nm). Semiconductor manufacturing andmaterials processing applications include in-situ reticle cleaning for 157 nm lithography, in-situ pre-deposition cleaning, photo-chemical vapor deposition, and UV curing. In many of these applications