The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has developed a processing system based on an electron beam-generated plasma. Unlike conventional discharges produced by electric fields (DC, RF, microwave, etc.), ionization is driven by a high-energy (similar to few keV) electron beam, an approach that can be attractive to atomic layer processing applications. In particular, high electron densities (10(10)-10(11) cm(-3)) can be produced in electron beam generated plasmas, where the electron temperature remains between 0.3 and 1.0 eV. Accordingly, a large flux of ions can be delivered to substrate surfaces with kinetic energies in the range of 1 to 5 eV. This provides the potential for controllably etching and/or engineering both the surface morphology and chemistry with monolayer precision. This work describes the electron beam driven plasma processing system, with particular attention paid to system characteristics and the ability to control the generation and delivery of ions to the surface and their energies. (C) The Author(s) 2015. Published by ECS. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse of the work in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. All rights reserved.
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