The effect of bias voltage on plasma characteristics in an inductively coupled argon plasma

Abstract

Inductively coupled plasma (ICP) has many advantages, such as high energy coupling rate, high-density plasma can be obtained at lower pressure and lower power. In particular, its ability to independently control and adjust the plasma density and the ion energy incident on the substrate has attracted much attention. So it has been widely used in semiconductor manufacturing. In the working process, it is a common method to increase a bias voltage on the lower electrode of the inductively coupled plasma source and to independently control the ion energy by changing the bias voltage. This paper uses the finite element method (FEM) to simulate the fluid model to simulate the discharge process of argon. The main thing is to explore the influence of the ICP cavity bias voltage on the characteristics of the plasma. We first compared the results of the two-dimensional model and the three-dimensional model and found that the two results are exponentially consistent, with a high degree of agreement. Due to a large number of three-dimensional simulation calculations, in order to save calculations, the two-dimensional axisymmetric method is used in the subsequent calculations. The influence of the bias voltage on the characteristics of the plasma density can be observed by changing the bias voltage. Therefore, it is hoped that it can be helpful to the plasma etching process.