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In the 50 years since the invention of transistor, silicon integrated circuit (IC) technology has made astonishing advances. A key factor that makes these advances possible is the ability to have precise control on material properties and physical dimensions. The introduction of plasma processing in pattern transfer and in thin film deposition is a critical enabling advance among other things. In state of the art silicon Ie manufacturing process, plasma is used in more than 20 different critical steps. Plasma is sometimes called the fourth state of matter (other than gas, liquid and solid). It is a mixture of ions (positive and negative), electrons and neutrals in a quasi-neutral gaseous steady state very far from equilibrium, sustained by an energy source that balances the loss of charged particles. It is a very harsh environment for the delicate ICs. Highly energetic particles such as ions, electrons and photons bombard the surface of the wafer continuously. These bombardments can cause all kinds of damage to the silicon devices that make up the integrated circuits.
Pattern transfer by dry etching and plasma-enhanced chemical vapor de position are two of the cornerstone techniques for modern integrated cir cuit fabrication. The success of these methods has also sparked interest in their application to other techniques, such as surface-micromachined sen sors, read/write heads for data storage and magnetic random access memory (MRAM). The extremely complex chemistry and physics of plasmas and their interactions with the exposed surfaces of semiconductors and other materi als is often overlooked at the manufacturing stage. In this case, the process is optimized by an informed "trial-and-error" approach which relies heavily on design-of-experiment techniques and the intuition of the process engineer. The need for regular cleaning of plasma reactors to remove built-up reaction or precursor gas products adds an extra degree of complexity because the interaction of the reactive species in the plasma with the reactor walls can also have a strong effect on the number of these species available for etching or deposition. Since the microelectronics industry depends on having high process yields at each step of the fabrication process, it is imperative that a full understanding of plasma etching and deposition techniques be achieved.