Isotropic plasma-thermal atomic layer etching of aluminum nitride using SF₆ plasma and Al(CH₃)₃

2022/08/31 by Haozhe Wang, Wang, Haozhe, Azmain A. Hossain +5 · 1 citation
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #GaN-based semiconductor devices and materials #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) #Plasma Diagnostics and Applications #Semiconductor materials and devices

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2209.00150

openalex publication_date 2022/08/31 · openalex created_date 2022/09/03 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01

Abstract

We report the isotropic plasma atomic layer etching (ALE) of aluminum nitride using sequential exposures of SF₆ plasma and trimethylaluminum (Al(CH₃)₃, TMA). ALE was observed at temperatures greater than 200 ^∘C, with a maximum etch rate of 1.9 Å/cycle observed at 300 ^∘C as measured using ex-situ ellipsometry. After ALE, the etched surface was found to contain a lower concentration of oxygen compared to the original surface and exhibited a ∼ 35% decrease in surface roughness. These findings have relevance for applications of AlN in nonlinear photonics and wide bandgap semiconductor devices.

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• Atomic layer etching of niobium nitride using sequential exposures of O2 and H2/SF6 plasmas

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