Enabling High Tech with Plasma-Based Computer Chips
Plasmas are essential to the manufacturing process of computer chips. Get a glimpse into how these low temperature plasmas are used in fabricating microelectronics on a large scale.
"In recent years, some of the most important innovations in plasma processing, plasma etching, and plasma deposition, has been the introduction of pulse plasma processes," said Dr. Richard Gottscho, Chief Technology Officer of Lam Research. "If I pulse the plasma, I can control how much time I expose the wafer to iron flux."
Transcript
00:00:00 [Music] a chip is another name for an integrated circuit and it consists of today nano scale transistors and an interconnect network of conducting lines and insulating barriers that interconnects all the transistors together to the scale such that you have billions of transistors in one square
00:00:31 centimeter or less i'm richard gotcho chief technology officer and executive vice president of lamb research corporation we're a semiconductor capital equipment company that supplies the semiconductor industry with solutions for depositing etchating and cleaning thin films the process to etch chips is typically a
00:00:56 plasma process the plasma is formed by passing a radio frequency current through a gas which causes the gas to break down and ionize and you form the plasma so the plasma is quasi-neutral it doesn't support strong electric fields or potential gradients across it but when it comes in contact with a surface like a wafer a very large voltage
00:01:19 develops between the plasma and that surface which repels the electrons back into the plasma but accelerates the ions out and so the etching that they induce occurs only in one direction it doesn't occur this way it only occurs that way and you want to cram as many lines as
00:01:40 possible together that's high density of circuitry you want vertical lines and that is the primary reason the industry went to plasma etching in recent years some of the most important innovations in plasma processing plasma etching and plasma deposition
00:02:00 has been the introduction of pulse plasma processes if i pulse the plasma i can control how much time i expose the wafer to iron flux versus how much time i can expose it to the neutral flux pulsing allows the charge to neutralize in between the pulses so you hit it with a pulse it may charge up and then you give it time for the charge to dissipate it
00:02:24 reduces aspect ratio dependent charging effects there are many other uh benefits of pulsing and it's still a very active area for search we're far away from optimizing the different pulsing conditions that can give the best results on the wafer what's really attractive about my job is
00:02:46 really recognizing that i'm part of an enterprise that's actually changing the world every single day we're solving problems that have never been solved before a never-ending pursuit of new device technology new system technology and we enable that to happen and i have to create an
00:03:07 environment where people can thrive and innovate and be able to take risks i really enjoy helping people to realize their full potential and that's a great motivator for me to come to work every day [Music] you