Experimental investigations on the magnetized inductively coupled plasma for 450MM semiconductor wafer processing

Summary form only given. In recent years, inductively coupled plasmas (ICPs) operating at low pressure have been intensively studied due to their applicability to the ultra-large-scale semiconductor wafer process. Although inductively coupled high-density plasma sources have many attractive aspects such as their simple structure, scalability to large size and low ion energy, they still have many problems associated with instability during low-pressure operation, especially in the range below 10^-3 Torr. In an effort to improve ICP characteristics, a weakly magnetized ICP(MICP) was suggested in other studies. MICP is a plasma source utilizing cavity mode of low frequency branch of right hand circularly polarized wave. In our previous simulation study, the simulation results show that plasma density uniformity was improved by 12% within 450mm area by applying weak magnetic field of 10 Gauss for 5mTorr Ar plasma. Furthermore, the resistance component of system impedance increases by a factor of 5, which implies that MICP can be operated in a very stable impedance matching and high power transfer efficiency region even for a large size plasma chamber. So the properties of MICP such as plasma density, plasma potential, electron temperature are measured using a tuned Langmuir probe in test chamber which is 540mm in diameter. The plasma density uniformity is improve in a weak magnetic field, so our previous simulation review is verified by experiment results.