Design of optical emission spectroscopy based plasma parameter controller for real-time advanced equipment control

Abstract With the advent of more than Moore’s law era, control of plasma etch process is expected to become inevitable. Given that highly complex plasma is a medium of etch processes, plasma parameters are key factors to be controlled. In addition, highly interactive plasma characteristics require multivariate control schemes. In this paper, we design a multi-loop controller which controls effective plasma parameters in Ar plasma conditions. The effective plasma parameters obtained by optical emission spectroscopy are paired with plasma reactor instrumental variables through relative gain array and singular value decomposition. Each single input-single output (SISO) system based on the pairing result shows successful disturbance rejection performance but interactions between SISO controllers occur. In order to handle the interactions, 2 × 2 multiple input-multiple output (MIMO) controllers with and without decouplers are simulated to track set point change. Based on the simulations, a MIMO controller with decouplers is implemented in a capacitively coupled plasma reactor and show feasible control performance without interaction. Hopefully, the results introduced in this paper contribute to making progress in plasma parameter control.