Downstream etching of silicon nitride using continuous-wave and pulsed remote plasma sources sustained in Ar/NF3/O2 mixtures
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Remote plasma sources (RPSs) are being investigated to produce fluxes of radicals for low damage material processing. In this computational investigation, the properties of a RPS etching system are discussed where an Ar/NF3/O2 gas mixture is flowed through an inductively coupled plasma source into a downstream chamber containing a silicon nitride coated wafer. The plasma is largely confined in the RPS due to the highly attaching NFx (x = 1–3) and an isolating showerhead although a weak ion-ion plasma maintained by [NO+] ≈ [F−] leaks into the downstream chamber. The etching of silicon nitride proceeds through iterative removal of Si and N subsites by isotropic thermal neutrals. When the fluxes to the wafer are rich in fluorine radicals, the etch rate is limited by the availability of NO molecules and N atoms which remove N subsites. As power deposition increases with continuous-wave excitation, the etch rate increases almost linearly with the increasing fluxes of NO and N atoms, as production of NO through endothermic reactions is aided by increasing gas temperature. Production of N atoms through electron impact dissociation of NO and NFx is aided by the increasing electron density. Similar trends occur when increasing the duty cycle during pulsed excitation. Addition of a plenum between the RPS and the downstream chamber aids in lateral diffusion of radicals before passing through the final showerhead and improves the uniformity of etching.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it