Impact of gas heating in inductively coupled plasmas

Recently it has been recognized that the neutral gas in inductively coupled plasma reactors heats up significantly during processing. The resulting ga s density variations across the reactor affect reaction rates, radical dens ities, plasma characteristics, and uniformity within the reactor. A self-co nsistent model that couples the plasma generation and transport to the gas flow and heating has been developed and used to study CF4 discharges. A Lan gmuir probe has been used to measure radial profiles of electron density an d temperature. The model predictions agree well with the experimental resul ts. As a result of these comparisons along with the poorer performance of t he model without the gas-plasma coupling, the importance of gas heating in plasma processing has been verified. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics .