Microwave Plasma Processing for VLSI Technology

Gaseous plasmas have been successfully used in microelectronics processing such as plasma oxidation, plasma nitridation, plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition and plasma etching. Low temperature film deposition technique using plasma is now considered as a key process for realising VLSIs. Plasma etching, a member of dry etching family, is essential for realisation of etched pattern of less than 2μm feature size. RF plasma is the most widely used technique for film deposition and etching in microelectronic applications. However, there are some limitations of RF plasma with regard to its density, the range of pressure in which the plasma can be generated and the damage produced in the substrate due to high self bias. Some of these limitations can be removed by using microwave plasma. In the present contribution the work on microwave plasma processing is reviewed and some experimental results obtained in our laboratory on microwave plasma processing are reported.