Defect Reduction And Line Width Roughness (LWR) improvement By Using A Post Precoat Treatment (PPT) In Waferless Chamber Conditioning (WCC)

Defect and line width roughness are two main yield detractors in advanced bitline dry etch process in high-volume DRAM memory manufacturing. In this paper, we present the results of defect reduction and LWR improvement by using a Post Pre-coat Treatment method in Waferless Chamber Clean recipe. Adding a PPT step at the end of WCC recipe reduces defect, inline critical dimension (CD) and LWR. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) results show pre-coat silicon oxide and/or PPT improves surface roughness by 30%. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) has been utilized to characterize the surfaces treated with and without PPT, indicating PPT can remove residue chloride and solidify SiO <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> film from its loose form. With the implementation of WCC with PPT, we have achieved 0.15% yield gain which is resulted from defect reduction, tighter inline CD and LWR improvement.