D. W. Schulte, T. McMahon, D. D. Hall, M. Johnson, W. Stickle, C. Sanders, G. Long, Hewlett Packard, Corvallis, OR

Summary: Experimental results demonstrated a low temperature O2 plasma processing treatment can produce an oxide of sufficient quality to produce good scanning capacitance measurement results. To minimize surface contamination during the plasma process it was necessary to optimize the plasma etch power and process pressure to reduce sidewall sputtering in the system. The optimal process conditions using a PlasmaTherm 790 etch system were determined to be a 15 minute plasma treatment at 20sccm O2, 100W, and 1000mTorr pressure. The best results were obtained by processing samples on a bare silicon wafer after performing an O2 chamber clean. Although this process results in some trace fluorine and carbon surface contamination, this appeared to have no impact on the SCM signal.