Electron-cyclotron resonance plasma reactor with multiple exciters

摘要

An Electron-Cyclotron Resonance (ECR) Plasma Reactor with Multiple Exciters is disclosed. The exciters relate to a mechanism that converts the radiation energy to the electron's kinetic energy. With using a suitable antenna distributes the RF energy to distinguished exciter individually, each exciter has its own magnetic coil to build high magnetic field to resonance the electron of the operation gas, ionize the gas and generate high speed electrons. All of the high-speeded electrons can be guided by magnetic flux and accumulated to the remained part of the reaction chamber. There is an auxiliary magnet to cause energized electron moving in a helix path. The helix path makes more chance of the collision between the electron and the process gas. When collision occurs, the electron's kinetic energy activates the process gas and high-density plasma or radicals generated. The auxiliary magnetic field is also used for controlling the uniformity of plasma near the wafer pedestal area. This is a distributed ECR system with multiple RF energy conversion mechanisms, the exciters. It simplifies the total system complexity by discrete but simpler main magnets, cooling system, low power RF energy sources etc. The invention gives an easy way to build a large-sized ECR just by increasing the number of exciters.