Investigation of Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition Chamber Mismatching by Photoluminescence and Raman Spectroscopy

Slight differences between supposedly identical process chambers are a well known problem in semiconductor manufacturing. In particular, individual plasma-aided process chambers are difficult to characterize and tune to match each other because plasma is a non-equilibrium state and can leave its “footprint” in subtle ways on a wafer. This process chamber mismatching phenomena was investigated in a dual chamber, commercial, high density plasma chemical vapor deposition system by monitoring SiO2/Si interface quality using multiwavelength room temperature photoluminescence and Raman spectroscopy. Effects on the SiO2/Si interface quality, from altering the gas flow pattern in the plasma process chamber, are also studied. © The Author(s) 2015. Published by ECS. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse of the work in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. [DOI: 10.1149/2.0161508jss] All rights reserved.