Proceedings of the
9th International Conference of Asian Society for Precision Engineering and Nanotechnology (ASPEN2022)
15 – 18 November 2022, Singapore
doi:10.3850/978-981-18-6021-8_OR-12-0302

Investigation on the Characteristic of Plasma Deep Etching in Wafer Cutting Industry

Kuan-Yu Lin1,2,a, Jia-Jhih Shen1, Chia-Hao Chang1, Chih-Hung Liu1, Ta-Hsin Chou1 and Keh-Chyang Leou2

1Mechanical and Mechatronics System Research Laboratories, Industrial Technology Research Institute, Taiwan

2Department of Engineering and System Science, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan

ABSTRACT

In response to the demand of component function enhancements, through silicon via technology for 3D IC package, wafer thinning and dicing and micro-electromechanical systems deep film etching process, the traditional etch processes will face a lot of challenges. The process examination of a vacuum plasma equipment system for silicon wafer dicing process has been discussed in this study. The experimental platform is inductively couple plasma (ICP) etching equipment built by ITRI MMSL to carry out the etching process of 12 inch silicon wafer. In this research, the influence of some important plasma parameters on the etching rate of silicon wafer has been explored, including that of ICP source power, radio frequency (RF) bias power, etching gas flow rate and process pressure. The 11.4 µm/min etching rate of the patterned wafer can be achieved by our design of the experiment with our etching equipment. It is found that when the SF6 flow rate increases, there are more etching species in the plasma, and the higher of RF bias power, the positive ions in the plasma are easily accelerated by the electric field in the vertical direction. Therefore, the ions can easily bombard the surface of the silicon wafer for physical etching, then the etching rate can be improved. The results of this study can be used to be parameter requirements of subsequent deep reactive ion etching processes in the future work.

Keywords: Plasma etching, Plasma dicing, Reactive ion etch



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