Lam Research Corporation

Chen-Hua Hsu

Bo Gong

Guangbi Yuan

Fengyuan Lai

Anand Chandrashekar

Leonard Wai Fung Kho

Curtis Warren Bailey

Huatan Qiu

Geoffrey Hohn

Gang Liu

Damodar Rajaram Shanbhag

Andrew H Breninger

Tony Kaushal

Krishna Birru

Rohit Khare

Thadeous Bamford

William Schlosser

Bhadri N Varadarajan

Forming a protective coating ex situ in an atomic layer deposition process to coat one or more chamber components subsequently installed in a reaction chamber provides a number of benefits over more conventional coating methods such as in situ deposition of an undercoat. In certain cases the protective coating may have a particular composition such as aluminum oxide, aluminum fluoride, aluminum nitride, yttrium oxide, and/or yttrium fluoride. The protective coating may help reduce contamination on wafers processed using the coated chamber component. Further, the protective coating may act to stabilize the processing conditions within the reaction chamber, thereby achieving very stable/uniform processing results over the course of processing many batches of wafers, and minimizing radical loss. Also described are a number of techniques that may be used to restore the protective coating after the coated chamber component is used to process semiconductor wafers.

Ex situ coating of chamber components for semiconductor processing

In some examples, a method for conditioning a wafer processing chamber comprises setting a pressure in the chamber to a predetermined pressure range, setting a temperature of the chamber to a predetermined temperature, and supplying a process gas mixture to a gas distribution device within the chamber. A plasma is struck within the chamber and a condition in the chamber is monitored. Based on a detection of the monitored condition meeting or transgressing a threshold value, a chamber conditioning operation is implemented. The chamber conditioning operation may include depositing a preconditioning film onto an internal surface of the chamber, depositing a silicon oxycarbide (SiCO) film onto the preconditioning film, and depositing a protective layer onto the SiCO film.

Oxidation resistant protective layer in chamber conditioning

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Chen-Hua Hsu