The Effect of N₂ Flow Rate in He/O₂/N₂ on the Characteristics of Large Area Pin-to-Plate Dielectric Barrier Discharge

Abstract

In this study, the effects of N 2 flow rate in the He/O 2 /N 2 gas mixture on the characteristics of a pin-to-plate dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) having the size of 100 mm  1000 mm have been investigated for the application to flat panel display processing such as photoresist ashing. The pin-to-plate DBD showed about 70-120% higher photoresist ashing rate at the same applied voltage compared to the conventional DBD. The addition of 3 slm of N 2 to He(10 slm)/O 2 (3 slm) showed the highest photoresist ashing rate of about 580 nm/min for the pin-to-plate DBD at 12 kV of AC voltage. The increase of N 2 flow rate in He/O 2 gas mixture up to 3 slm appeared to increase the density of N 2 þ ions and N 2 metastables while the oxygen atomic density appeared to decrease continuously. The increase of photoresist ashing rate with the increase of N 2 flow rate up to 3 slm was related to the increase of the substrate surface temperature by the increased collision of N 2 þ ions and N 2 metastables with the substrate.

Atmospheric pressure PECVD of SiO2 thin film at a low temperature using HMDS/O2/He/Ar

“…The substrate was fed to the AP-PECVD system at 0.3 m/min through an in-line feeder. HMDS (Sigma-Aldrich Co., purity 99.9%, Si 2 NH(CH 3 ) 6 ) was used as the Si precursor. HMDS was fed into the system by bubbling He through the HMDS liquid reservoir kept at 65°C.…”

“…Especially, to generate high-density plasma at low breakdown voltages, a pin-to-plate-type DBD consisting of a multi-pin power electrode instead of a planar power electrode was used [6]. As the precursor of Si, hexamethyldisilazane (HMDS) was used and the effect of the HMDS and oxygen flow rates on the deposited SiO 2 -like film characteristics were investigated.…”

“…The power electrode, shown in Fig. 1, comprised a multi-pin-type electrode instead of a blank electrode to enable operation at low breakdown voltage and to produce higher plasma densities at the same applied voltage, as determined in previous study [6].…”

Characteristics of SiO thin films deposited by atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition using a double-discharge system

“…However, the substrate can be easily damaged by the formation of a filamentary discharge in DBD system, especially at a high-power condition for a high-rate deposition or with a high oxygen content to deposit more stoichiometric SiO 2 [12][13][14]. To remove possible damage to the substrate by the filamentary discharge, in our previous research [15], the AP-PECVD has been operated with a remote-type configuration by locating the substrate on a third electrode separately from the DBD source during the deposition of SiO 2 thin film, however, this process shows other problems, such as a lower deposition rate, porous film property, etc.…”

Atmospheric Pressure Remote Plasma Ashing of Photoresist Using Pin-To-Plate Dielectric Barrier Discharge

“…Figure 4(a) shows the parameters that can be obtained from the curve. 11) The actual power applied to the system can be obtained from the parallelogram-type area enclosed by the Q-V Lissajou curve shown in the figure. Also, from the slopes (Q=V) of the curve, the capacitances of the discharge system during the power-on and power-off period can be calculated.…”