Observations on the formation and ashing of giant folds in high dose

ion-implanted resists
Georgy K. Vinogradova) and Vladimir M. Menagarishvili
MC Electronics Co. Ltd., 907-8 Shimoimasuwa, Shiranecho Yamanashi 400-02, Japan
~Received 26 March 1998; accepted 16 October 1998!
A kinetics of surface transformations and ashing of high energy high dose As1 implanted resists was
studied. Continuous bulk polymer structures, having minimum cross-sectional dimensions 10–30
times larger than the initial resist thickness, were found. These structures, named as giant folds, are
formed as a result of heating and melting of the normal polymer resist sublayer and its interaction
with a mechanically deformed implanted resist layer. The giant folds are responsible for the most
difficult to remove surface remaining features of ion implanted resists processed in downstream gas
discharge ashers. It is shown that the main problem of dry ashing of ion implanted resists of this type
is the flow patterns of the normal resist sublayer, not the hard implanted surface layer itself.
© 1999 American Vacuum Society. @S0734-211X~99!00601-0#

I. INTRODUCTION throughput, which is why the elevated temperature, 250–

The growing number of semiconductor devices utilizes
deep ion implantation of As, P, B, etc., elements. The ion
energy and implantation doses are going to increase up to
20–1500 keV and 1016 – 1014 cm22, correspondingly. The
physical and chemical effect of ion bombardment on poly-
mer resists is a complex function of the type of implant ions,
their energy, and dosage. The polymer resist films used in
ion implantation as a masking material become very hard to
remove due to severe modification of their surface layer.
This layer is a highly cross-linked dehydrogenated ~carbon-
ized! polymer insoluble in organic solvents.1,2 Thus, the ini-
tially uniform polymer resist film becomes a heterogeneous
two-layer structure.
Downstream dry resist ashing ~stripping! is one of the
most frequently used technologies in modern semiconductor
manufacturing. There are several situations of resist ashing
when uncontrollable properties of polymer resists bring
about unpredictable process results. Very hard to remove re-
maining materials can survive and deteriorate wafers after
the plasma ashing, even when followed by a wet cleaning
process. The problem is well known for process engineers
but has to be explicitly explained here in order to formulate
the problem.
Normal resists being basically carbon chain polymers
having a few cross-links undergo fast and clean ashing in
virtually any kind of oxygen asher as a result of thermally or
ion activated oxidation by atomic oxygen. However, ion im-
planted (I/I) resists can never be ashed at the same rate as
normal resists.
The so called dry ashing or downstream gas discharge
processes cannot completely remove such resists provided
that only pure oxygen gas is used as a source of radicals. I/I
resist can be etched under typical reactive ion etching ~RIE!
conditions under substantial surface ion bombardment and
process temperature below 50 °C. However, the RIE process
induces high electric damage to wafers and has a very low
a!
Electronic mail: 100510.3707@compuserve.com
300 °C, fast, low damage downstream ashing became a su-
perior common technology.
The I/I resist heated up to ,80 °C easily deforms and
raptures. This well known phenomenon called ‘‘popping’’
consists of the peeling of the hard modified top skin of the
resist and the formation of numerous bubbles and folds. The
popping can occasionally appear even at room temperature
creating flat bubble lenses, but it dramatically increases at
elevated temperatures. The popping essentially degrades ash-
ing results. Therefore, a principal contradiction exists: el-
evating the process temperature, necessary to increase the
ashing rate, inevitably stimulates popping.
Two distinct kinds of the residual material can be found
on the wafer after the downstream ashing of I/I resist. We
will follow here the terms used by process engineers and
designate these two materials as a ‘‘residue’’ and a ‘‘remain-
ing polymer.’’
Let us define the first one, the residue, as a new, compli-
cated inorganic/organic compound produced on the surface
of the processed wafer. It appears and then resides on the
wafer. It is a final product of all transformations of the initial
normal polymer resist sublayer and the hard implanted skin.
This material cannot be evaporated by atomic oxygen at tem-
peratures below 300 °C. However, it can be easily removed
by the standard acid or alkaline based wet processes or even
by a water flow. The residue usually includes highly reactive
hydroxides of the implanted elements and must be highly
wettable compounds. After being taken from the processing
chamber into air the residue is formed as droplet-like indi-
vidual particles about 1–20 mm in size which are uniformly
distributed over the wafer including sometimes the areas
which were not covered with the resist initially. Sometimes it
appears as a dark spot having irregular shape and very low
~<0.1 mm! thickness. The residue can form large group pat-
terns being typical replicas of the popping patterns.
The remaining polymer is another material. It is basically
a material remaining almost unchanged, i.e., it is the not
removed portion of the initial resist. The remaining patterns

95 J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B 17„1…, Jan/Feb 1999 0734-211X/99/17„1…/95/6/$15.00 ©1999 American Vacuum Society 95
96 G. K. Vinogradov and V. M. Menagarishvili: Observations on the formation and ashing of giant folds
are usually larger than the residue. They commonly have
smoothed elongated, T- and triangle-, complex-, and group-
shaped patterns. The size can vary from a few microns up to
millimeters. Typical complex patterns like rings, bracelets,
necklaces, chains, etc. are well known. Downstream I/I ash-
ing takes usually a long time, from minutes to hours, al-
though it never guarantees final removability of the remain-
ing polymer. It is important to underline that the remaining
polymer cannot be removed by any wet process including
those capable of etching a wafer itself. The remaining poly-
mer has an excellent intact interface with the wafer surface.
It would be worth mentioning that the group patterns of
both residue and remaining features look essentially similar
since both reflect the surface history from the very beginning
stage of the popping patterns. However, it must be remem-
bered that the popping pattern itself does not determine the
nature of the material composing the residue and remaining
polymer.
It is commonly accepted that the problem of I/I resist
ashing is associated with the hard to remove remaining. It is
also commonly believed that the origin of the remaining is
the hard skin of the initial resist modified by ion implanta-
tion. There are several hypotheses concerning the nature of
these hard to remove features. One of them counts on the
popping phenomena since the remaining patterns always
look as if they were reproducing the popping patterns. The
problem of low removability of the remaining polymer is
commonly supposed to be solely based on the hardness of
the I/I modified top layer resist. It seems to be a very rea-
sonable suggestion since the underlying normal resist film
does not exhibit any difficulty for oxygen ashing. The under-
lying normal resist layer remains untouched by the ion bom-
bardment.
The splinters of the hard polymer skin generate some part
of the remaining polymer. Such pieces of hard skin falling
one onto another produce double and triple sandwiches
which is why the two step dry process was proposed in order
to overcome the problems associated with popping.3 The first
plasma ashing step was proposed in order to eliminate the
hard skin under the temperature well below the popping
threshold in a capacitively biased discharge. The second step
can be utilized in any high temperature asher.
Practically all published studies on the I/I resist ashing
assumed that the hard skin itself is responsible for the hard to
remove remaining polymer. However, the mechanism of I/I
remaining polymer formation was not established. This com-
plicated phenomenon has been studied ‘‘statistically,’’ as
process results. Some attempts to disclose the molecular
structure of the hard layer and material transformations were
focused too much on the hypothesis of a hard to remove
surface skin or crust. Here we present a closer microscopic
look at the surface phenomenon that makes clear the physical
mechanism of the genesis of final remaining polymer. The
mechanism follows straightforward from the kinetic observa-
tions.
J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B, Vol. 17, No. 1, Jan/Feb 1999
96
II. EXPERIMENT
The 8 in. wafers with 300 Å thermal oxide and As ~40
keV, 531015 cm22! ion implanted positive resists of about
1.2 mm thickness were mainly used because such resist pro-
duces very hard to remove remaining polymer. This I/I resist
differs from the P1 type in the fact that the hard skin of As1
implanted resist is essentially thinner. However, the studied
As1 resist shows lower removability than that of the P1 type.
Ashing was performed in a downstream chamber of a
novel capacitively balanced full wave or lambda resonator
(l-R) inductive discharge4 utilizing transmission line prop-
erties of an induction coil and having virtually 100% energy
efficiency operating without a matching box. Typical dis-
charge conditions were: 3 slm ~standard liters per minute!
pure oxygen gas flow rate, 1.38 Torr pressure, 2 kW ab-
sorbed radio frequency ~rf! power at 27 MHz, 270 °C wafer
platen temperature. The wafers were thoroughly inspected
after every processing step with an optical Olympus
BH3MJL and electron scanning SEM-6301F JEOL field
emission microscopes.
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
There is no secondary rf capacitive plasma5 in the l-R
discharge downstream chamber under the ashing conditions.
The ashing rate of normal resist up to about 10 mm/min was
achieved at a wafer temperature of about 270 °C. It falls
down to about 40 Å/min at room temperature thus revealing
that any noticeable surface activation by energetic positive
ions does not exist. The positive ion current density on the
wafer surface does not exceed about 1 mA/cm2 and ion en-
ergy is lower than 20 V as measured by flat surface electro-
static probes.5 Hence, the ashing should be considered as a
true thermally activated oxidation by dissociated oxygen.
To begin with, we studied the microscopic surface mor-
phological transformation of the I/I resist under elevated
temperatures and atmospheric pressure. The substrates
heated up to 130–150 °C showed bubbles and broken skin
patterns. Typically, the hard skin was peeled off from the
sublayer. Sometimes, the peeled off hard skin was picking
parts of the softened sublayer from the wafer surface. The
broken parts of the skin almost never flew away from the
wafer.
The behavior of the I/I resist changes when the tempera-
ture exceeds about 150 °C. Figure 1~a! shows the I/I resist
heated up at 270 °C. There are numerous surface folds cre-
ated by the hard skin. The underlying layer of normal poly-
mer in open areas is very smooth and usually invisible but
can be easily distinguished by scratching. The color photo-
graphs of this pattern clearly show that the normal resist was
melted. Then the forces of surface tension, which depend on
the surface energy of all contacting materials ~wafer, top
hard skin surface, bottom hard skin surface, and the normal
resist sublayer! affect it. The hard skin can be easily distin-
guished by mechanical probing with a fine quartz fiber. This
sample was then placed in the l-R asher for further process-
ing.
97 G. K. Vinogradov and V. M. Menagarishvili: Observations on the formation and ashing of giant folds
FIG. 1. ~a!–~f! Sequence of optical microphotographs showing an appear-
ance of hard to remove polymer remaining: ~a! resist surface as heated at
270 °C, ~b! after 5 s ashing; ~c! 10 s ashing; ~d! 20 s ashing; ~e! 40 s ashing;
~f! one more site of the same sample after 10 s ashing. Sample: As1 40 keV
531015 cm22 implanted polymer resist, small squares are about 1003100
micrometer.
Figure 1~b! shows that many areas, previously covered
with the hard skin, appear to be opened after a very short 5 s
ashing. We surprisingly found that the hard skin undergoes
ashing with almost same rate ~'20%–30% slower! as nor-
mal resist at 270 °C. This was well established in numerous
kinetic experiments with step by step optical microscope in-
spection on the same processing wafers. Consequently, the
double and triple ‘‘sandwiches’’ created somewhere by the
broken hard skin must etch only about three to four times
slower in comparison with the normal polymer. However, it
was found that depending on the implantation and ashing
conditions the remaining polymer is formed which cannot be
removed even in tenfold longer processing time. This re-
maining polymer is very hard to remove under the strong rf
capacitive bias with ion activation as well.
Figures 1~a!–1~e! shows a sequence of As I/I resist
samples treated step by step by active oxygen. There are
several remaining structures on the surface formed within the
initial bubble lenses. The round bubble boundaries can be
easily recognized in Figs. 1~a!–1~c!. The lightest areas rep-
resent clean wafer surface or the thin underlying normal
polymer. There are many residual polymer creations on the
positions corresponding to the folds which can be easily
found in Fig. 1~a!. The darker ~hence higher/thicker! the ini-
tial pattern, the longer it resides on the surface during ashing.
JVST B - Microelectronics and Nanometer Structures
97
FIG. 2. SEM microphotograph of a giant fold at the edge of a broken silicon
wafer with the I/I resist heated up to 300 °C. Normal resist sublayer from
the surrounding area is collected into the fold.
Both optical and scanning electron microscopy ~SEM! ob-
servations revealed that the highest polymer creations are as
high as about 10–50 mm, that is one to two orders of mag-
nitude thicker than the initial resist. Therefore, the remaining
polymer represents very special structures, which can be re-
ferred to as giant folds. Certainly, such structures cannot be
ashed as quickly as resist layers with normal thickness. Fig-
ure 1~f! shows another area of the same sample after about
10 s ashing. Here, large bubbles have grown and then col-
lapsed.
The cross section of the folds has a smoothed triangle/bell
shape. Figure 2 shows a typical giant fold at the edge of a
broken silicon wafer. It is well seen that the normal polymer
from the surrounding surface is collapsed into the giant fold.
Numerous tests were performed under an optical microscope
control to ensure that the giant folds are really filled with the
normal resist. Miniature mechanical probes and acetone sol-
vent were used in the course of the tests.
One of the most difficult to remove typical feature is the
round boundary of a bubble which can be easily distin-
guished on the surface of I/I implanted resists. The biggest
remaining polymer, however, usually resides inside the
bubbles. These areas were covered with the hard skin and
one could suppose that these giant folds are made of multiple
layers of the broken hard skin. However, the remaining poly-
mer is not empty inside—it is just a normal polymer resist
covered by the hard skin as any other covered areas. The
only difference is that these folds are anomalously high and
they are filled with the normal resist, which melted and be-
came a movable liquid under the high temperature. The folds
are then filled due to the surface tension forces. Usually, the
very top point of the T-connected giant folds is empty.
Hence the phenomenon is strongly dependent on the surface
energy of all the participating surfaces: normal resist, face
and back of the hard skin, and wafer surface. It provides
some insight on the possible impact to the fold formation of
the resist design.
It is hard to distinguish at present: what is the main sur-
face interaction leading to the giant fold formation? It seems
that the normal resist’s own surface tension and the wettabil-
98 G. K. Vinogradov and V. M. Menagarishvili: Observations on the formation and ashing of giant folds
FIG. 3. Top-down optical microscope view (503) of the I/I polymer heated
up in acetone. Area ‘‘A’’ represents the unchanged hard skin; ‘‘B’’ shows
the I/I skin with acetone penetrated beneath; ‘‘B1’’ is a bare silicon wafer
surface.
ity of both the wafer and hard skin by the melted resist are
important.
It is known that the surface implanted polymer skin has
essentially compressive stresses which is why the popping
usually produces a lot of flying splinters. Moreover, this
stress must be distributed across the hard skin in order to
reach its maximum at the skin/normal resist interface. In-
deed, all the high-energy implant ions bombarding the sur-
face penetrate up to the same interfacial boundary and stop
there. Cascade collisions in the resist also produce direc-
tional mechanical flux toward the hard skin/normal resist in-
terface. Consequently, it is the most heterogeneous and
dense portion of the hard skin. This skin can be easily peeled
off from the underlying normal polymer as shown in Fig. 3.
These two rolls were formed when the wafer was heated up
in acetone. Both upper and underlying surfaces look very
smooth. The areas where the top skin layer cannot break are
not rolled up. The hard skin forms free rolls upto 2 to 3 mm
in length. Acetone does not penetrate through the dense
cross-linked skin.
The normal resist layer is well protected by the top hard
skin from any chemical attack. Acetone penetrates beneath
the skin and dissolves normal polymer only through defects
or ruptures. The normal resist sublayer does not lose its solu-
bility in acetone even after being heated up to 270 °C in
atmosphere when it was covered by a continuous hard skin.
However, the sublayer becomes insoluble, i.e., oxidized and
cross linked, when the hard skin is removed before heating.
The same happens when normal resist is attacked by active
oxygen under a low-pressure high temperature oxygen
downstream processing condition.
The normal resist, being liquidized above the polymer
glass transition temperature, shrinks into separate features on
the wafer surface and on the top surface becomes a thick,
cross-linked, hard to remove remaining polymer. It is remov-
able neither by acetone nor by H2SO4 /H2O2 or NH4OH/H2O2
water solutions, being totally covered with a cross-linked
oxidized top layer. It has perfectly intact interfacial contact
with the wafer preventing the solvent or any acid/base solu-
tions from penetrating beneath the remaining polymer.
J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B, Vol. 17, No. 1, Jan/Feb 1999
98
The mechanism of the remaining feature’s formation has
been traced using direct observations of individual structures
formed in the resist layer under the action of heating, solvent
treatment, mechanical stretching, and atomic oxygen. It
would be useful to describe the overall surface transforma-
tions in order to reveal their most critical features affecting
the whole process and its final results.
The ion implanted resist consists of two distinct layers:
the top layer of a highly cross-linked polymer modified by
the high energy ion beam and the underlying or bottom layer
of normal resist not affected by ions. The boundary between
the two layers is sharply defined since the ion implantation
beams are monoenergetic and the resists are highly uniform
~thickness nonuniformity of <0.1% is typical! and smooth.
The top hard skin is not soluble in organic solvents and is
very rigid having a thickness of about 0.1–0.5 mm depending
on the ion implantation conditions: ion energy and kind of
implanted ions.1–3 The higher the implantation energy and
the lighter the implanted ion, the thicker the hard skin be-
comes. Its ability to deform is limited. It easily deforms only
in one direction like a paper, rigid plastic film, or thin metal.
It ruptures rather than cracks.
The hard skin of P1 implanted resists is usually more like
a crust. However, the hard skin of As1 implanted resists is
flexible and slightly deformable. It cannot be referred to as a
crust. This is the kind of I/I resist we consider here.
When heated, the I/I resist starts to release internal com-
pressive stresses existing in the skin: it peels away from the
softened underlying layer and forms folds. Large bubble
lenses are formed as well. The folds are generally formed as
numerous semipipes @Fig. 1~a!#. They grow in longitudinal
direction like they were formed by a mouse running beneath
the hard skin since the end point has a maximum curvature,
and hence, maximum peeling off forces. Their length is lim-
ited by surrounding folds and can be up to a few millimeters
on test bare resist wafers. The semipipes can be folded by the
cross folds at some points, especially when the semipipe is
formed on a narrow, long pattern. A patterned wafer can
promote special folds firmly connected to the pattern edges
by the side wall hard skin of the implanted resist. Generally,
patterned wafers generate a much lower number of folds than
the test bare wafers.
The volatile components evaporating from the underlying
layer contribute to the bubble formation. The growth can
stop for several reasons: the internal stresses and volatile
components can be exhausted, the skin can be ruptured, an
outside limit can be reached, or another bubble can be
joined.
Usually, the hard skin is peeled off from the softened
sublayer. In rare cases it can peel off some small portions of
the normal sublayer from the wafer surface as well. Such
occasion depends on the ratio of the interfacial cohesive
force of the skin/sublayer and sublayer/wafer and heating
dynamics.
When ruptured, the bubble shell has nothing to do but
fold. Several kinds of folds can be formed. Figure 4 shows
99 G. K. Vinogradov and V. M. Menagarishvili: Observations on the formation and ashing of giant folds
FIG. 4. Schematic mechanism of giant fold formation in ion implanted re-
sists: ~a! initial sample consisting of two layers of resist; the top layer is a
hard skin, the underlying layer is normal polymer; ~b! a bubble is created
from the hard skin; ~c! the bubble shell is fallen down and irreversibly
deformed; giant folds are created; ~d! the giant folds fill with liquid polymer.
schematically how the biggest folds in the bubble are cre-
ated.
The skin is usually ruptured at the bubble edge, hence the
bubble shell falls down and forms an initial semifold step,
which can move to the bubble center. This moving semifold
is stopped by its own rigidity of the spherically shaped hard
skin shell. Then one or two, and in rare cases three or four,
additional folds can meet at the inner area of the initial large
bubble. These rigid folds stop one another and create gener-
ally a triangle or sometimes higher order irregular closed
polygon depending on the number of folds inside a bubble
boundary, as can be seen in Fig. 1.
The bubble shell at the ring boundary cannot return to its
initial flatness since it has been irreversibly deformed during
the formation. Hence, a ring shaped fold must be always
generated around the initial bubble. This is the origin of the
ring shaped remaining polymer and residual patterns. One
more situation arises when the bubble is large enough to start
folding from the center. Here, a central deep valley is formed
with typically three to five surrounding folds.
The skin quickly forms numerous bulky surface structures
under elevated temperatures. The most important process ac-
companying folding is the melting of normal polymer. When
wafer temperature essentially exceeds the so-called glass
transition temperature the resist becomes a thin liquid and
flows into the folds under the action of surface tension. Thus,
the giant folds made of hard skin filled with normal polymer
are in fact bulk three-dimensional structures. The filling pro-
cess can further deform folds into compact dense structures
under the action of capillary forces. Namely, these high cre-
ations become the remaining polymer after the high tempera-
ture downstream ashing and wet cleaning. Such remaining
polymer cannot be removed by any wet process because an
etchant cannot penetrate under the large, up to hundred mi-
cron wide, normal polymer structures having an excellent
interfacial contact with the wafer and covered by the oxi-
JVST B - Microelectronics and Nanometer Structures
99
FIG. 5. Typical residue on the wafer surface after the downstream oxygen
ashing of As1 implanted resist. The web composing the residue is wettable
and highly reactive in atmosphere.
dized dense cross-linked layer. So, the remaining polymer
generally forms before the downstream ashing starts, in con-
trast to the residue, which forms as a very final product.
Figure 5 shows typical residue on the wafer surface. It looks
like about 0.1–0.5-mm-thin fibers compose a web. Usually
such residue appears on the wafer surface as many small, but
well visible, liquid droplets because of their extremely high
wettability. Chemical reactions going on in these droplets
can even damage the wafer surface sometimes.
The highest creations are usually formed as a laying
T-shaped structure where one fold is connected to another.
Such structures have maximum mechanical stability which is
why the final remaining polymer is usually formed like a
kind of triangle structure: it should look like a smoothed
etched T-shape or a triangle with initially concave and finally
convex sides. The remaining polymer being initially a nor-
mal chain polymer becomes oxidized, highly crosslinked and
dehydrogenated due to the long residence time under ashing
~etching! conditions.
The folding mechanism determines both shapes and di-
mensions of the final remaining structures on the surface.
Hence, this is the main mechanism that controls the dry re-
movability of ion implanted resists. The hard skin splinters
from broken bubbles, which shield some areas of the resist,
are of minor importance especially in high temperature
downstream ashing processes. They can be easily removed
since their temperature rises very high because of poor heat
contact to the wafer. Our microscopic observations shows
that the hard skin undergoes ashing at only about 20%–30%
slower that the normal polymer.
Consequently, the large hard and dense highly carbonized
remaining polymer, observed on the wafer surface after I/I
resist ashing, does not usually represent an ash of the initial
hard skin, but appears to be a consequence of etching of
anomalous thick normal polymer features generated due to
the interaction of the liquidized polymer sublayer with the
giant folds of hard skin. The observed mechanism predicts
the effects of ion implantation energy and dose, resist thick-
ness, and process conditions on the kind of remaining fea-
tures and the process quality and throughput. For example,
there might be a paradoxical decrease of the remaining poly-
100 G. K. Vinogradov and V. M. Menagarishvili: Observations on the formation and ashing of giant folds
FIG. 6. Unique 3 to 4 mm long periodic structure of the I/I skin rupture
showing that the I/I skin is not a hard crust but a rigid viscoelastic film.
mer when the implantation energy is increased. It should be
observed due to the thickening of the hard skin and corre-
sponding thinning of the normal resist sublayer. The mecha-
nism provides additional reasoning for stripping ion im-
planted resists in two steps involving initial skin removal
under low temperature ~plasma ion bombardment activation,
for example! and final ashing of the sublayer under high
temperature as it was previously proposed.3 The mechanism
predicts the upper limit to the first step temperature, which
must be below the limit of giant folds formation. It shows
that not the popping itself, but the melting of the normal
polymer sublayer and its interaction with the skin is the main
reason for the remaining polymer.
One more technique to avoid giant fold formation consists
of the improved molecular design of resists and ion implan-
tation processes taking into account both physical and
chemical interactions between the hard skin and normal
polymer sublayer. The simplest way is to optimize the ratio
@normal sublayer#/@hard skin# thickness in order to essen-
tially suppress the formation of giant folds and their filling.
The glass transition temperature can be increased as well.
Another way is to optimize the wettability of the heavily
implanted skin interface by the melted normal polymer.
Some ion implanted resists peel off from the normal resist at
high temperature, never creating bulk polymer structures be-
cause of low surface wettability.
Ion implanted resists forming the giant folds must be typi-
cally specified for about 500% over-ashing time to guarantee
the removability of remaining polymer under the real pro-
cessing conditions in any high temperature downstream
asher. Usual 50%–100% over-ash ~etch! time is considered
to be useful to guarantee a clean surface in spite of any
J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B, Vol. 17, No. 1, Jan/Feb 1999
100
process or material nonuniformity. This is correct for the
materials that keep their initial or have a decreased thickness.
However, all ion-implanted resists produce a few polymer
features essentially higher than the initial resist which is why
the common optical end point detectors ~EPDs! never detect
the real ‘‘just-ashed’’ moment, meaning that all the polymer
is gone. Moreover, they can give even a shorter ‘‘just time’’
in comparison with the uniformly distributed resist because
the main area normal resist can be substantially collapsed
into the bulky narrow folds. Hence, the main area of the
wafer can be opened, but still an essential portion of the
polymer remains. It means that the real just time is underes-
timated.
There were some unusual phenomenon found in this
study. We observed a ‘‘zip-lock’’ looking rupture of the so-
called hard skin accompanied by the formation of fine peri-
odic structures on both edges of the rupture including up to
hundreds of elementary almost sine waves along a 3 to 4 mm
rupture as shown in Fig. 6. It shows along with Fig. 3 that
the top I/I layer of high dose As1 implanted resist is not a
hard and fragile crust but a rigid viscoelastic material.
IV. CONCLUSION
The phenomena occurring on the surface of ion implanted
resist under downstream oxygen ashing conditions were mi-
croscopically studied. The specific mechanism of hardest to
remove remaining polymer features has been established.
The mechanism consists of interactions between the hard im-
planted resist skin and the underlying normal polymer under
temperatures high enough to melt the underlying layer.
The mechanism of remaining polymer formation includes
several kinetic steps and physical interactions.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that some ion implanted
resists never create giant folds for some reasons: too thin
skin or sublayer, too thick fragile skin, easy rupture of the
skin, small lithography patterns, etc. However, even in such
cases a surface tension of the melted normal resist is usually
responsible for the filled folds, or better to say waves, which
are typically 3–5 mm high.
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