Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Comp. Ltd.

Yih-Song Chiu

Shao-Yen Ku

Wen-Ting Tsai

Jao-Sheng Huang

Chen-Hsiang Leu

Fu Yi Chang

The present disclosure provides one embodiment of an etch system. The etch system includes a tank designed to hold an etch solution for etching; a silicon monitor configured to measure silicon concentration of the etch solution; a drain module coupled to the tank and being operable to drain the etch solution; and a supply module being operable to fill in the tank with a fresh etch solution.

System and method for an etch process with silicon concentration control

A feed-forward method and apparatus for controlling spacer width measures spacer width during processing then further processes the spacers in a spacer width adjustment operation to achieve a desired final spacer width. Silicon nitride spacers may be measured after plasma etching and the measured spacer width is automatically compared to the final desired spacer width and a time for further processing is calculated based on a correlation between processing time and spacer width loss. Using computer interface manufacturing, the measured spacer width data is provided to a computer that performs the calculation and provides the further processing time or a recipe to the tool used for the spacer width adjustment operation. The spacer width adjustment operation may be wet processing in an SPM solution that oxidizes the spacers and an HF clean operation may be used to remove the oxidized portion and yield spacer widths within acceptable specification limits.

Growing community of inventors

Hsin-Chu, Taiwan

Yih-Song Chiu