J. Asmussen et al., THE DESIGN AND APPLICATION OF ELECTRON-CYCLOTRON-RESONANCE DISCHARGES, IEEE transactions on plasma science, 25(6), 1997, pp. 1196-1221
During the past ten years electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) plasma-pr
ocessing technology has matured into a diverse assortment of ECR plasm
a reactor and plasma source design concepts and has been extensively a
pplied to numerous low-pressure plasma processing applications, This p
aper reviews the substantial progress made in the design and applicati
on of ECR plasma technology in recent years. Five representative ECR r
eactor/source designs from large-area 450-cm(2) discharges to compact
plasma sources inserted into molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE) machines are
described in detail, The performance of these ECR devices is evaluate
d by computing performance figures of merit from the available experim
ental data. These calculations are then compared with the behavior as
predicted from a global model of the discharge. This comparison sugges
ts that global plasma models can be employed as an approximate method
for ECR reactor design. More extensive diagnostics and numerical model
s that investigate the spatial variation of ion density and ion energy
distributions are also presented. Several illustrative ECR plasma-pro
cessing applications are discussed. These include submicron etching of
silicon, etching of III-V and II-VI electronic and photonic devices,
and the epitaxial growth of GaN, The variety and the sophistication of
these applications demonstrate that low-pressure high-density ECR pla
sma processing technology has evolved into a very useful, versatile gr
oup of plasma-processing machines.