Differentially pumped reactive gas injector

Abstract

One process that may be used to remove material from a surface is ion etching. In certain cases, ion etching involves delivery of both ions and a reactive gas to a substrate. The disclosed embodiments permit local high pressure delivery of reactive gas to a substrate while maintaining a much lower pressure on portions of the substrate that are outside of the local high pressure delivery area. The low pressure is achieved by confining the high pressure reactant delivery to a small area and vacuuming away excess reactants and byproducts as they leave this small area and before they enter the larger substrate processing region. The disclosed techniques may be used to increase throughput while minimizing deleterious collisions between ions and other species present in the substrate processing region.