Tokyo Electron Limited

Lam Research Corporation

Francois Chandrasekar Dassapa

Brian J Coppa

Deepak Vedhachalam

Brian K McMillin

Described herein are architectures, platforms and methods for acquiring optical emission spectra from an optical emission spectroscopy system by flowing a dry cleaning gas into a plasma processing chamber of the plasma processing system and igniting a plasma in the plasma processing chamber to initiate the waferless dry cleaning process.

Controlling dry etch process characteristics using waferless dry clean optical emission spectroscopy

Broadly speaking, an invention is provided for monitoring a plasma optical emission. More specifically, the present invention provides a method for monitoring the plasma optical emission through a variable aperture to detect an endpoint of a plasma etching process without interferences that could lead to false endpoint calls. The method includes collecting optical emission data from a plasma through an aperture defined by moveable members. The moveable members are capable of varying a configuration of the aperture. The method also includes holding the moveable members at a particular time to cause the aperture to maintain a fixed configuration. The method further includes detecting a specific perturbation in the plasma optical emission while holding the moveable members.

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Fremont, CA, United States of America

Francois Chandrasekar Dassapa