With optical and opto-electronic components seeing ever more sophisticated integration into semiconductor devices, the demand for high-purity, low-damage and epitaxial oxide and perovskite films is increasing in many sectors of the industry. At the same time, manufacturing is moving to 300mm wafers, while trying to overcome the throughput limitations on traditional MBE or IBS systems.
To meet this demand, EVATEC has developed a 300mm multi-source platform for the low-damage sputtering of oxides and compounds using Facing Target Cathode (FTC) magnetrons.
At the core of the successful development of this system lies the control of the plasma under different forms of cathode bias.
In this contribution, we present Particle-In-Cell plasma simulations that provided fundamental insights into the formation and dynamics of FTC plasmas driven by DC and RF-power.
Using a combination of the two, the detrimental energy of Negative Oxygen Ions impacting the substrate was drastically reduced, thus further enhancing low-damage deposition.
Initial samplings from the FTC multi-source modules on the ClusterLine 300 (TM) have been corroborating the expected performance also in terms of uniformity, epitaxy, and throughput.