Deposition damage evaluation of fluorine doped silicon oxide using simple damage monitoring system

An arcing defect, generated during inter-metallic dielectric (IMD) fluorine doped silicon oxide (SiOF) film deposition, is fatal damage which occurs during the plasma enhanced deposition process. After IMD SiOF film deposition on the metal patterned wafer of logic device structure, the arcing defect is monitored using the KLA™ defect detecting tool. From KLA™ tool, it can be seen that the arcing defect has a close correlation with the deposition power so it is possible to reduce the arcing defect by decreasing the SiOF deposition power. The plasma charge from non-uniform plasma, induced during the SiOF film deposition, is characterized using the simple plasma damage monitoring (SPDM) system which is based on a very simple metal-oxide-silicon (MOS) capacitors. The SPDM system results show that the amount of the plasma charge from non-uniform plasma decreases as the SiOF deposition power decreases. This work focuses on finding an arcing defect free condition during IMD SiOF film plasma enhanced deposition on logic devices, by finding the “no plasma damage” condition. It is seen that when the SiOF film deposition at the high frequency (13.56 MHz) / low frequency (400 kHz) power condition is 500 W / 150 W or less, there is no plasma induced arcing defect. We report that the main cause of arcing defect, generated during SiOF film deposition, is the plasma charge from non-uniform plasma, induced during deposition process by using the SPDM system.