Chapter10_introduce_to_etching.ppt

Chapter 10 Etching Introduction to etching. Wet chemical etching: isotropic. Anisotropic etching of crystalline Si. Dry etching overview. Plasma etching mechanism. Types of plasma etch system. Dry etching issues. Dry etching method for various films. Deep Si etching (can etch through a wafer). 1 NE 343: Microfabrication and thin film technology Instructor: Bo Cui, ECE, University of Waterloo; http://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~bcui/ Textbook: Silicon VLSI Technology by Plummer, Deal and Griffin Material removal: etching processes Etching is done either in “dry” or “wet” methods: Wet etching uses liquid etchants with wafers immersed in etchant solution. Wet etch is cheap and simple, but hard to control (not reproducible), not popular for nanofabrication for pattern transfer purpose. Dry etch uses gas phase etchants in plasma, both chemical and physical (sputtering process). Dry plasma etch works for many dielectric materials and some metals (Al, Ti, Cr, Ta, W…). For other metals, ion milling (Ar+) can be used, but with low etching selectivity. (as a result, for metals that cannot be dry-etched, it is better to pattern them using liftoff) Figures of merit: etch rate, etch rate uniformity, selectivity, and anisotropy. Etching is consisted of 3 processes: Mass transport of reactants (through a boundary layer) to the surface to be etched. Reaction between reactants and the film to be etched at the surface. Mass transport of reaction products from the surface through the surface boundary layer. 2 Figures of merit: selectivity Etching with mask erosion Etching selectivity: The ratio of etching rate between different materials, usually the higher the better. Generally, chemical etching has high selectivity, physical etching (sputtering, milling) has low selectivity. For fabrication, the selectivity is usually between film material and mask material, and is defined by Sfm. (f: film; m: mask) Temperature affects selectivity 3 Selective over-etch of different materials The film is et