Effects of bias on surface properties of TiN films fabricated by hollow cathode discharge J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A 25, 837 (2007); 10.1116/1.2748803 The influence of the growth rate on the preferred orientation of magnetron-sputtered Ti-Al-N thin films studied by in situ x-ray diffraction J. Appl. Phys. 98, 044901 (2005); 10.1063/1.1999829Preparation and characterization of high-quality TiN films at low temperature by filtered cathode arc plasma A study of the impact of physical vapor deposition conditions on the etch properties of TiN has been conducted using a transformer coupled plasma. This work focuses only on a Cl 2 -based etch plasma. It is shown that the crystallographic orientation of TiN, observed from x-ray diffraction spectra, has a major influence on the etch behavior. Etch yields at varying dry etch conditions of two types of TiN, with different crystallographic orientations, have been studied quantitatively. The high roughness which is created during plasma exposure was identified as being the result of different etch rates of grains and intergranular material at the grain boundaries. Moreover, it is shown that TiN͑111͒ is more difficult to etch, resulting in more pronounced roughness, than TiN͑200͒, which is easier to etch, resulting in smoother surfaces for certain process conditions.
Uniformity and wafer-to-wafer reproducibility of plasma etch processes are often related to the conditioning of the plasma etch chamber walls. For advanced complementary metal-oxide semiconductor fabrication, numerous metals are used which might deposit on the chamber walls during etch processes and as these metals are not always straightforward to remove, process instabilities can occur. This happens because recombination of atomic species on the chamber walls determines to a certain degree the plasma composition. Therefore, in this article, the impact of metal etch residues, especially titanium and tantalum residues, on plasma composition and uniformity is studied. The chamber walls are analyzed by x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy analysis of so-called floating samples and the densities of Cl, Br, O and F in Cl2, HBr, O2, and SF6 plasmas are monitored by optical emission spectroscopy. Plasma uniformity is checked by measuring etch rates across 300 mm silicon wafers. It is found that chlorine and bromine have similar recombination probabilities on the metals than on anodized aluminum. Fluorine and oxygen recombination, however, is strongly influenced by the presence of metal residues. Accordingly, for fluorine and oxygen based plasmas, metal residues showed to have an impact on the plasma uniformity.
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