Plasma Modeling and Diagnostics in Semiconductor Equipment Design

The global semiconductor industry is poised for a decade of growth and is projected to become a trillion-dollar industry by 2030. About 70 percent of growth is predicted to be driven by just three industries: automotive, computation and data storage, and wireless. New capabilities are being enabled by the continuation of IC scaling to smaller and smaller feature sizes with the present technology being mass-produced by 14nm - 5nm node technology, with smaller nodes down to 3nm and less currently being developed and optimized by IC manufacturers. Device performance requirements also drive critical dimension (CD) non-uniformity to sub-nanometer across the entire 300mm wafer for sub-20nm features and yield requirements extend this patterning to 1.5mm of edge exclusion. Wafer fab production relies on plasma etch solutions to be stable at these levels across long periods of time and capable of flexibility in multiple applications. This growth will continue to be greatly facilitated by a much better and fundamental understanding of the basic chemical, physical, and electromagnetic processes that occur during the industry-enabling plasma processing of semiconductor devices.

In this presentation, the crucial role plasma modeling and diagnostics play in guiding the design of plasma etch solutions to develop state-of-the-art Plasma Etch Chamber technology will be discussed. Modeling and diagnostics are essential not only to understand chamber characteristics and etch mechanisms but also to accelerate hardware development to meet customer time-critical needs. Different types of plasma modeling tools commonly used in Plasma Etch Chamber development with reference to findings from literature and work undertaken at Lam Research will be presented. The continued relevance of plasma modeling and diagnostics in Semi equipment design and thoughts on the future direction for angstrom-level etching will be covered.