ECLIPSE-CHIPS: GOALI: Diagnostics and Physics of Plasmas in Modern Industrial CCP Etch Tools

This award is made in response to Dear Colleague Letter 24-130, as part of the ECosystem for Leading Innovation in Plasma Science and Engineering (ECLIPSE) interdisciplinary program. The award supports a joint Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) effort by the University of California - Los Angeles and Lam Research Corporation that includes a collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories. Each year the worldwide industry produces over a trillion computer chips, or about 150 chips per person, with semiconductor sales amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. Some are simple transistor circuits and others are extremely complicated AI circuits. Memory chips with up to 50 billion transistors on a chip are now being produced, and all these chips are made in machines containing plasmas. The plasma-based manufacturing is responsible for production of much of the modern electronics, yet improvements in the future generations of chips rely on better understanding of the plasma behavior. This award supports a research collaboration between the chip making industry and UCLA to do just that. The intricate construction of chips occurs in highly specialized fabrication facilities, where components from capacitors and wires to transistors are meticulously assembled on an atomic level. Central to this sophisticated manufacturing process is the use of plasma etch technology, an indispensable tool in the creation of these fundamental building blocks of modern electronics. This research effort will use lasers to measure the motion of positively charged ions and the electric fields inside an actual chip making tool donated by the LAM Research Corporation. One technique uses Laser Induced Fluorescence to track ions. This technique makes ions moving at a certain velocity glow when a laser beam of exactly the right wavelength strikes them. Motion maps are generated for all velocities. The second technique, Raman Dip Spectroscopy, uses two carefully tuned lasers to excite electrons in outer atomic orbits of the neutral atoms. The result is a map of the electric field in the device with 10 nanosecond temporal resolution and spatial resolution of 10’s of microns. These measurements have never been done in a modern plasma etch tool. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.