At&t Bell Laboratories

Bell Telephone Laboratories

Marek A Sternheim

Eliezer Kinsbron

Joshua Alspector

Willem Van Gelder

A method and apparatus for measuring etch depth during the etching of a device pattern into a nontransparent substrate, is disclosed. The method makes use of the finding that the device patterns etched into substrates produce diffraction patterns when illuminated. Thus, according to the method, a beam of light is directed onto a region of a substrate, into which region a portion of a device pattern is being etched. The light reflected from this region forms a diffraction pattern and, according to the inventive method, the intensity of a diffraction order is detected and recorded as a function of time during the etching procedure. The intensity of the diffraction order varies with time. The etch rate of the substrate is inversely proportional to the period of the oscillations in the recorded intensity-time curve.

Interferometric method and apparatus for measuring etch rate and

Polyoxide capacitors for semiconductor integrated circuits having oxide dielectric films of 500 Angstroms or less are fabricated using in-situ doped polysilicon layers to have electrical field breakdowns of from 6 to 9 MV/cm. The first polysilicon layer is formed by LPCVD using silane and phosphine at a temperature in the range from about 570 degrees C. to 595 degrees C. These capacitors are relatively precisely valued devices used particularly in applications such as filter/codecs. However, they are useful wherever integral capacitors are needed having high dielectric strength polyoxides, including such semiconductor integrated circuit devices as EPROMs and dynamic RAMs.

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Livermore, CA, United States of America

Marek A Sternheim