A High Flux Atom Beam Tool for Semiconductor Materials

As electronic device sizes decrease, ion-damage will preclude the use of plasma-based tools for many processing steps and charge-free processing will be required. Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) proposes to develop a neutral high flux, high fluence atom beam source for charge-free semiconductor processing. The proposed source will produce a wide variety of atom beams for many etching and deposition applications. The proposed tool is based on PSI's Microwave Driven Plasma Sprayer (MDPS) and employs an electrodeless discharge with swirl gas flow injection to produce stable discharges over a wide range of operating pressures (0.1 to 10 atm). In Phase I we will produce and use an oxygen atom beam to remove resist materials from patterned Si substrates, a nitrogen atom beam to demonstrate higher flux and fluence of nitrogen atoms, and a fluorine atom beam to hyperthin Si wafers at high rates. The beams will have significantly reduced ion content than current sources and will reduce surface damage. The successful completions of these demonstrations will establish the feasibility of our approach to develop an atom source that can reslace slasma sources for manv semiconductor srocessina asslications. This project will develop a versatile, charge-free, high flux atom beam semiconductor processing tool which can replace existing plasma-based tools in situations where ion-induced damage will degrade device performance. These include many etching, cleaning and deposition processes such as resist removal, surface cleaning and III-V nitride deposition. The development of this tool will enable the successful fabrication of electronic devices with submicron feature sizes.