Fault Detection of Plasma Etchers Using Optical Emission Spectra

The objective of this paper is to investigate the suitability of using optical emission spectroscopy (OES) for the fault detection and classification of plasma etchers. The OES sensor system used in this study can collect spectra at up to 512 different wavelengths. Multiple scans of the spectra are taken from a wafer, and the spectra data are available for multiple wafers. As a result, the amount of the OES data is typically large. This poses a difficulty in extracting relevant information for fault detection and classification. In this paper, we propose the use of multiway principal component analysis (PCA) to analyze the sensitivity of the multiple scans within a wafer with respect to typical faults such as etch stop, which is a fault that occurs when the polymer deposition rate is larger than the etch rate. Several PCA-based schemes are tested for the purpose of fault detection and wavelength selection. A sphere criterion is proposed for wavelength selection and compared with an existing method in the literature. To construct the final monitoring model, the OES data of selected wavelengths are properly scaled to calculate fault detection indices. Reduction in the number of wavelengths implies reduced cost for implementing the fault detection system. All experiments are conducted on an Applied Materials 5300 oxide etcher at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in Austin, TX.