Surface smoothing during plasma etching of Si in Cl2

Effects of initial roughness on the evolution of plasma-induced surface roughness have been investigated during Si etching in inductively coupled Cl2 plasmas, as a function of rf bias power or ion incident energy in the range Ei  ≈ 20–500 eV. Experiments showed that smoothing of initially rough surf...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied physics letters 2016-11, Vol.109 (20)
Main Authors: Nakazaki, Nobuya, Matsumoto, Haruka, Tsuda, Hirotaka, Takao, Yoshinori, Eriguchi, Koji, Ono, Kouichi
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Applied physics
Computer simulation
Evolution
Ion scattering
Monte Carlo simulation
Plasma etching
Plasmas (physics)
Roughening
Smoothing
Surface roughness
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Summary:Effects of initial roughness on the evolution of plasma-induced surface roughness have been investigated during Si etching in inductively coupled Cl2 plasmas, as a function of rf bias power or ion incident energy in the range Ei  ≈ 20–500 eV. Experiments showed that smoothing of initially rough surfaces as well as non-roughening of initially planar surfaces can be achieved by plasma etching in the smoothing mode (at high Ei ) with some threshold for the initial roughness, above which laterally extended crater-like features were observed to evolve during smoothing. Monte Carlo simulations of the surface feature evolution indicated that the smoothing/non-roughening is attributed primarily to reduced effects of the ion scattering or reflection from microscopically roughened feature surfaces on incidence.
ISSN:0003-6951
1077-3118
DOI:10.1063/1.4967474