Detecting arcing events in semiconductor manufacturing equipment

Bipolar arcs require a high voltage difference between two closely spaced points. As an example; if there is excessive deposition or contamination on the deposition and or cover ring in a physical vapor deposition tool (PVD) tool, a DC bipolar arc can occur leading to ablation of underlying materials, wafer breakage or chamber damage caused by the discharge. In some cases these incidents are not identified until numerous wafers have been processed. Therefore it is essential to identify arcing at the time of the event. In this paper, we address a problem for arc detection in a PVD chamber. The electrostatic chuck (ESC) critical parameter(s) are captured with 1000Hz sampling frequency and wavelet transforms are used to isolate arcs from the raw data. This methodology can easily be implemented on other plasma chamber types.