Pulsed plasma etching for semiconductor manufacturing

Power-modulated (pulsed) plasmas have demonstrated several advantages compared to continuous wave (CW) plasmas. Specifically, pulsed plasmas can result in a higher etching rate, better uniformity, and less structural, electrical or radiation (e.g. vacuum ultraviolet) damage. Pulsed plasmas can also ameliorate unwanted artefacts in etched micro-features such as notching, bowing, micro-trenching and aspect ratio dependent etching. As such, pulsed plasmas may be indispensable in etching of the next generation of micro-devices with a characteristic feature size in the sub-10 nm regime. This work provides an overview of principles and applications of pulsed plasmas in both electropositive (e.g. argon) and electronegative (e.g. chlorine) gases. The effect of pulsing the plasma source power (source pulsing), the electrode bias power (bias pulsing), or both source and bias power (synchronous pulsing), on the time evolution of species densities, electron energy distribution function and ion energy and angular distributions on the substrate is discussed. The resulting pulsed plasma process output (etching rate, uniformity, damage, etc) is compared, whenever possible, to that of CW plasma, under otherwise the same or similar conditions.