REACTION SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENT OF A Cl2/Ar INDUCTIVELY COUPLED PLASMA FOR ETCHING OF SILICON

As the key feature size keeps shrinking down, inductively coupled plasma (ICP) has been widely used for etching. In this study, a commercial ICP etcher filled with Cl2/Ar mixture was simulated. The simulation was based on a commercial software CFD-ACE+, which is a multi-module solver. For the simulation part, CFD-ACE module was used for reactor scale and CFD-TOPO module was used for feature scale simulation. We have reached a reasonable agreement between the simulative and experimental results. Specifically, the different causes of sidewall bowing and microtrenching were discussed. We also analyzed the causes of special profile as trench width scaling down. Moreover, the agreement validates correctness of the chemistry mechanism, so it can be used as guidance for the process designing and manufacturing equipment improvement.