Photo-Resist Ashing Byatmospheric Pressure Plasma

Summary form only given. Atmospheric plasma has an advantage not to use vacuum equipments. Thus, many researchers are beginning to develop methods of plasma generation at the atmospheric pressure and to find various industrial applications of the atmospheric plasmas, which may replace vacuum plasmas. Photo-resist (PR) ashing process has been conducted in vacuum plasma. PR ashing has been conventionally done in wet ashing and dry ashing. But the wet ashing have many problems including high-cost, environmental pollution and so on. Therefore, the dry ashing is more preferable process. Unfortunately, the present dry ashing requires the vacuum equipments at the moment. This paper presents experimental results of the PR ashing using glow plasma at the atmospheric pressure. The plasma generation is powered by a RF power source. The PR ashing by the atmospheric pressure plasma was investigated under various processing conditions. The ashing rate has been investigated in terms of processing temperature, gas composition, gas flow rate, RF power and exposure time. We measured PR thickness using micro-area gauge (NanoSpec/AFT). The results of this study will be useful for the optimization of ashing process conditions at the atmospheric pressure.