International Business Machines Corporation

Bennett Robinson

Michael Hatzakis

Fletcher Jones

Juri R Paraszczak

Kenneth J Muroski, Jr

Processes for producing and using a novel CVD apparatus for depositing silicon layers onto suitable substrates and for the in-situ etching removal of background silicon deposits from the interior walls of the apparatus. The invention comprises using an apparatus having a fused quartz reaction chamber and precoating the interior wall of the reaction chamber with a thin continuous barrier layer of Al.sub.2 O.sub.3 which is inert to the etching gas introduced for the removal of the background silicon deposits.

Plasma CVD apparatus and processes

It has been discovered surprisingly that when a plasma is produced by exciting a gas or mixture of gases with microwaves and simultaneously also with a radio frequency electrical discharge, that the resulting plasma is much more highly chemically reactive than a plasma produced instead by only one of the excitations. Such a plasma etches a surface much faster than the sum of the etch rates produced by each of the excitations individually and the etching anisotropy may be controlled by varying the ratio of the applied power of each of the two kinds of simultaneous excitation.

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Bennett Robinson