Etching Equipment

Etching- metal and oxide etch equipment are used to remove excess parts of the deposited film. High density plasma sources... 

Semiconductor industry, vacuum chamber applications, clamp rings for gas plasma etching equipment, wafer retaining rings for gas plasma etching, vacuum tips. .. 

A second practical aspect is the up-scaling of the etching equipment, which is not available as an off-the-shelf product from equipment manufacturers. The task is to etch glass sheets of a size of about 1 m2 in diluted HCI with excellent homogeneity over the whole substrate area. This requires precise control of both etch time and etchant concentration, while additionally the requirements of a clean process have to be fulfilled to avoid layer imperfections or pinholes in the silicon layers. With a prototype in-line etcher, we have achieved excellent uniformity of the etching step on substrates up to 30 x 30 cm2 [48]. This process can be easily up-scaled to production size. 

Plasma properties. Aurum has outstanding plasma properties that enable apphcations for etching equipment parts for semiconductors. 

Properties and Control. Early cupric chloride formations had slow etch rates and low copper capacity and were limited to batch operation. Regenerated continuous operation using modified formulations has brought useful improvements. Etch rates as high as 55 s for 1 oz copper are obtained from cupric chloride-sodium chloride-HCl systems operated at 130°F with conventional spray-etching equipment. Copper capacities are maintained at 20 oz/ gal and above. However, more recently, higher copper contents and adjusted chemistries at 125°F typically etch at 75 to 90 s for 1 oz copper. 

FIGURE 60.3 Suggested modifications to inner/outerlayer etching equipment. 

The relationship among chamber materials used in semiconductor etching equipment, etching, wet cleaning, sputtering, and etch by-products is shown in Fig. 1[21, 22, 35, 36]. 

Lam Research Corporation has been putting great efforts and sup>port for the new chamber materials development. It becomes more critical for semiconductor plasma etching equipment companies to develop new and advanced materials for current and next generation plasma etching feature size applications. 

The formed polymer layer can be used as a mask in a plasma etching equipment. 

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