Effect of Cl2 /Ar gas mixing ratio on „Pb,Sr…TiO3 thin film etching behavior in inductively coupled plasma

The development of anisotropic etching process for
Pb,SrTiO3
PST thin films is an important task to provide a small feature size and an accurate pattern transfer. Etching characteristics of PST thin films were investigated using inductively coupled plasma etching system as functions of Cl2/Ar gas mixing ratio. The PST etch rate increased with the increase of chlorine radical and ion energy intensity. It was found that the increasing of Ar content in gas mixture lead to sufficient increasing of etch rate. The maximum etch rate of PST film is 56.2 nm/min at Cl2 /
Cl2+Ar of 0.2. It was proposed that the sputter etching is a dominant etching mechanism while the contribution of chemical reaction is relatively low due to low volatility of etching products.The electron temperature and plasma density were measured by using the Langmuir probe
Hiden Analytical Ltd, ESPION.The mass and the ion energy distributions
IEDs were measured with a Hiden EQP plasma probe
Hiden Analytical Ltd, EQP 510 that consists of an electrostatic ion energy analyzer
ESA in series wi tha