Monitoring and diagnosis of plasma etch processes

Author

Dolins, S.B. ; Srivastava, Aditya ; Flinchbaugh, Bruce E.

Author_Institution

Texas Instrum. Inc., Dallas, TX, USA

Volume

1

Issue

1

fYear

1988

fDate

2/1/1988 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

23

Lastpage

27

Abstract

Plasma etching removes material from a silicon wafer by applying power and gases in a chamber. As material is removed from a wafer, the amount of particular chemicals given off can be measured; this technique is called emission spectroscopy and the measurements are called endpoint traces. An expert system that automatically interprets the traces has been designed and built. The system combines signal-to-symbol transformations for data abstraction and rule-based reasoning for diagnosis. The system detects problems as soon as they occur and also determines their causes

Keywords

automatic testing; computerised monitoring; computerised spectroscopy; electronic engineering computing; elemental semiconductors; expert systems; integrated circuit testing; silicon; sputter etching; Si wafer; computerised monitoring; diagnosis; emission spectroscopy; endpoint traces; expert system; plasma etch processes; rule-based reasoning; signal-to-symbol transformations; Etching; Gases; Monitoring; Particle measurements; Plasma applications; Plasma chemistry; Plasma diagnostics; Plasma materials processing; Plasma measurements; Silicon;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Semiconductor Manufacturing, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0894-6507

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/66.4369

Filename

4369