Elimination of Passivation RIE Arcing in RFSOI Process

This paper will demonstrate the method to resolve the plasma-induced damage (PID) at Wafer ID area, i.e., Optical Character Recognition (OCR) region arcing on silicon- on-insulator (SOI) wafer of RFSOI passivation reactive-ion etching (RIE) process. This is important because the arcing phenomenon causes manufacturing cycle time delay due to Wafer ID reading failure, as well as yield loss on dies near the arcing region. The study was designed by allowing the photolithography exposure followed by develop process at the OCR region during the Top Metal, passivation, and Aluminum (Al) masks to get rid of the floating Al at that region. The result showed 0% arcing was achieved even with high passivation RIE RF bias power. The power of the laser scribe process has also been optimized in order to compensate Wafer ID readability issue at OSAT after the implementation of new process scheme.