Coating the inner surfaces of high-powered plasma processing equipment has become crucial for reducing maintenance costs, process drift, and contaminants. The conventionally preferred alumina (Al2O3) coating has been replaced with yttria (Y2O3) due to the long-standing endurance achieved by fluorine-based etching; however, the continuous increase in radio frequency (RF) power necessitates the use of alternative coating materials to reduce process shift in a series of high-powered semiconductor manufacturing environments. In this study, we investigated the fluorine-based etching resistance of atmospheric pressure-sprayed alumina, yttria, yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG), and yttrium oxyfluoride (YOF). The prepared ceramic-coated samples were directly exposed to silicon oxide etching, and the surfaces of the plasma-exposed samples were characterized by scanning electron microscopy, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. We found that an ideal coating material must demonstrate high plasma-induced structure distortion by the fluorine atom from the radical. For endurance to fluorine-based plasma exposure, the bonding structure with fluoride was shown to be more effective than oxide-based ceramics. Thus, fluoride-based ceramic materials can be promising candidates for chamber coating materials.
We utilized a passivation layer to improve the leakage current and reliability characteristics of GaN-based light-emitting diodes. The electrical and optical characteristics of the fabricated LEDs were characterized by current-voltage and optical power measurements. The HfO2 passivation layer showed no optical power degradation and suppressed leakage current. The low deposition temper- ature of sputtered HfO2 is responsible for the improved reliability of the LEDs because it suppresses the diffusion of hydrogen plasma into GaN to form harmful Mg-H complexes.
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