Dielectric Etching Equipment Performance Improvement

As continuous growing of IC industry and scaling down of feature sizes, the advance equipment was released to production with high expense. Every IC manufacturer spends more and more funds on the new equipment pull in and line capacity extend. And the depreciation of fixed assets (Equipment) and high equipment maintenance cost is the key factor of the wafer production cost. So, the equipment utilization improvement and tools uptime improvement become to the key player in the IC FAB or foundry.This article combined the dielectric etch process of the copper line, to improve the etch tool's uptime by provide the solution of the headache equipment trouble, process window optimize and so on.1. By regular optimize the ESC de-chucking window, and apply the method of ESC de-chucking endpoint detect, success to fix the ESC de-chucking worse trouble in dielectric etch process, obviously improved the tool uptime and extend the ESC life time over 80%,2. Apply the auto dry clean method to maintain the chamber condition of liner remover etch (LRM), which combined the H2/N2 treatment together with CF4 based dry clean recipe, success to fix the LRM offline etch rate unstable trouble, and improved the offline etch rate CPK from < 1 to> 1.33.3. Compare the defect performance of the process kits with the Y2O3 coating and anodizing coating, found the Y2O3 with benefit of the defect reduction.4. Apply advanced process control (APC) in the trench etch application to improve the CD control capability, indirectly improved the equipment productivity.5. By optimize the PM plan and extend the chamber mean time to clean, improved the preventive maintain (PM) successful rate, shorten the PM working time to reduce schedule down-time, improved the tool uptime.6. From the view of system thinking, with the support of CIM and MES, apply the IEMS spec control and FDC system in the FAB operations, improved the fault detect capability and tool reliability.This article reduce the equipment maintain cost by applying the technology mentioned above, extend the MTBC and improve the tool uptime. Meanwhile, the study results improve the etch process reliability, reduce the defect and improve the wafer final yield.