Lam Research Corporation

Tony Kaushal

Anand Chandrashekar

Leonard Wai Fung Kho

Bo Gong

Curtis Warren Bailey

Huatan Qiu

Geoffrey Hohn

Gang Liu

Guangbi Yuan

Damodar Rajaram Shanbhag

Andrew H Breninger

Fengyuan Lai

Krishna Birru

Chen-Hua Hsu

Rohit Khare

Thadeous Bamford

William Schlosser

Ramkishan Rao Lingampalli

Jeremy Tucker

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

A gas distribution plate for a substrate processing system includes a ceramic lower portion of the gas distribution plate including a plurality of ceramic green sheets. A ceramic upper portion of the gas distribution plate includes a plurality of ceramic green sheets. An electrode is printed on at least one of an upper surface of the ceramic lower portion and a lower surface of the ceramic upper portion using metal screen printing. A first plurality of through holes is machined through the ceramic lower portion and the ceramic upper portion of the gas distribution plate prior to sintering.

Ceramic gas distribution plate with embedded electrode

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Campbell, CA, United States of America

Tony Kaushal