Kawasaki Steel Corporation

Osamu Kinoshita

Naoki Kubota

Yoshio Kaneko

Shigemi Murakawa

An etching system contains a plasma chamber, a charge exchange chamber and a processing chamber. The charge exchange chamber and the processing chamber are partitioned with a porous plate provided with a number of fine linear microchannel holes. Positive ions generated by the plasma chamber are accelerated by an accelerating electrode in the charge exchange chamber, charge-exchanged and introduced as neutral particles through the microchannel holes into the processing chamber. Neutral particles are vertically entered into an object to be processed as neutral particle beams that are completely aligned by the microchannel holes. An object with a large surface area can be etched with high accuracy by making the porous plate a size which corresponds to the object. Thus, plasma processing with only neutral particles is carried out with high accuracy even when the surface area of the object is large.

Plasma processing system and method

A surface processing apparatus and a dry etching method using a neutral beam. The surface processing apparatus comprises a plasma chamber for generating a plasma P, a neutralizing chamber for converting an ion beam extracted from the plasma P by an ion extracting electrode into the neutral beam, and a processing chamber for introducing therein the neutral beam and etching a substrate S to be processed using the neutral beam. There is also provided a static electric field lens comprising two spaced first electrodes provided on the inner periphery of the neutralizing chamber and a second electrode interposed therebetween so as to obtain the neutral beams having low energy and high flux.

Growing community of inventors

Chiba, Japan

Osamu Kinoshita