Status and challenges in electrical diagnostics of processing plasmas

Dry processing based on reactive plasmas was the main driven force for micro- and recently nano-electronic industry. Once with the increasing in plasma complexity new diagnostics methods have been developed to ensure a proper process control during etching, thin film deposition, ion implantation or other steps in device fabrication. This work reviews some of the unconventional methods developed in the last two decays to measure the parameters of reactive plasmas including, the test function method, thermal probes, and plasma-sheath-lens probes. The negative ion detection and surface contamination in plasmas with a high degree of contamination are also addressed.