US 4,858,556 AGranted

Method and apparatus for physical vapor deposition of thin films

OwnerJerome F. Siebertinventor

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Abstract

A physical vapor deposition system is disclosed for routinely achieving unprecedented processing uniformity of thin films on substrates of a size comparable to or larger than the source. The system includes a plurality of substrates; a plurality of deposition, etching, and/or heating sources; a plurality of mobile in-situ process monitors for obtaining the fundamental processing profiles that characterize the processing properties of each source; and mobile fixturing responsive to the fundamental processing profiles for effecting prescribed motion scenarios of the substrate relative to the source; to thus provide the means for achieving extremely uniform as well as an unprecedented range of prescribed non-uniform final thin film processing profiles, irrespective of the size of the substrate relative to the size of the source.

Claims47

Dependent claims

A physical vapor deposition system comprising:

at least one substrate;
at least one source for processing a thin film on the surface of said substrate;
a source-operating means for operating said source at different sets of values of operating parameters during said thin film processing;
a motion-and-positioning means for moving said substrate into different positions relative to said source during said thin film processing;
a calibration means for measuring and predicting the hypothetical processing profiles of said thin film processing, where a said hypothetical processing profile is the amplitude and shape of the result of said thin film processing per unit processing time obtained at any one of said processing positions while using any one of said sets of values of source operating parameters;
a modeling means for predicting the final processing profile of said thin film on said substrate that results from any specified weighted superposition of said hypothetical processing profiles;
and
a control means for said source-operating means and said motion-and-positioning means for implementing any desired source-operating scenario and motion-and-positioning scenario during said thin film processing in order to effect any said weighted superposition;
to this predict and achieve a desired range of said final processing profiles of said thin film on said substrate, where said range is limited only by the diversity in shapes of said hypothetical processing profiles.

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Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.