A general concept for monitoring plasma induced charging damage

For many years antenna structures have been successfully applied for detection of charging damage from a variety of sources such as plasma etching, ion implantation and plasma enhanced deposition. In this work a guideline for PID monitoring standardization for JEDEC has been given. A systematic hierarchy approach has been presented in order to be able to establish an automatic data evaluation usable for production monitoring. A minimum set of antenna test structures has been addressed, as well as the correct characterization techniques. It has been shown that a diagnostic stress is required, in order to be able to detect signals when PID issues occur. The large amount of data generated by the monitoring measurements is hardly manageable without an automatic procedure. The definition of such procedure depends on the choice of the monitoring parameters, but aims in any case to reduce the measured parameters to a clear and simple figure of the PID that can be easily trended. Finally, the obtained PID figure can be used to establish wafer scarp criteria based on PID.