Integrated simulation of equipment and topography for plasma etching in the DRM reactor

An integrated procedure including the plasma equipment and profile modeling is developed and applied to the contact etching process for the DRM (dipole ring magnet) reactor. In this simulation scheme, the static magnetic field solver, HPEM (hybrid plasma equipment model) and the topography simulator based on the level-set algorithm are used one by one to reproduce etch rates and profiles in terms of the equipment operating parameters such as the gas composition ratio and power. We investigated the contact etching of SiO₂ and Si₃N ₄ in the DRM plasma reactor with CHF₃-CO-O₂ gas mixture. In terms of etch rates at the wafer center, the results show agreement with experimental values with less than 6% errors. The uniformities of the etch rate and contact profile also agree with those of experiments. These agreements show the possibility of the systematic simulation method in developing and optimizing a dry etching process