Y. Raitses
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory,
United States
Keywords: Plasma processing, plasma diagnostics, materials synthesis
Summary:
Plasma processing of materials at the atomic scale requires precise control over the flows of charged species and radicals to the substrate (e.g. wafer). In modern plasma processing reactors, these plasma flows can be controlled by various parameters including RF power, RF bias pulsing, use of multiple RF frequencies etc. There exists a tremendous number of possible variations of setpoints of these parameters. Optimal combinations for different technological processes and materials are usually selected manually and optimized by processing engineers, based on empirical and in part modeling approaches. Any advances towards more predictive and controllable processing of new materials for emerging applications (e.g. high speed computing, QIS), using highly sophisticated and versatile plasma reactors either emerging or still in design would require measurements of densities, temperatures, energies and fluxes of plasma species including charged and neutral particles flowing/accelerated towards and impinging on the wafer/substrate. The obtained quantitative time-resolved and time-averaged experimental results can be used for validation of computational codes and implementation of processing control with AI support. Here, we discuss several advanced laser-based diagnostics of plasma and plasma-surface interactions including advanced structured-light configurations (See for example, in Ref. [1]) which can make these diagnostics suitable for industrial processing reactors. Reference: [1] I. Romadanov, and Y. Raitses, Rev. Sci. Instrum. 97, 073002 (2023). Acknowledgement:This work was supported by the US Department of Energy through contract DE-AC02-09CH11466