Improvement of miniaturized 2.45 GHz ECR plasma flood gun at PKU

Abstract

In an ion implanter, plasma flood gun (PFG) is used to provide electrons to neutralize the accumulated charge on the wafer surface to avoid breakdown damage. With the development of ion implantation technology, four key requirements have been put forward for PFG. They are simple structure, plasma with high density and low electron temperature, no metal contamination and long life. The existing PFG, such as the filament type PFG, can hardly meet the above requirements at the same time. 2.45 GHz ECR ion source with the advantages of high beam density, high stability, long life time and no filament metal contamination, has shown great potential to work as PFG. Recently, a miniaturized 2.45 GHz permanent magnet electron cyclotron resonance PFG (PMECR-PFG) has been developed at Peking University (PKU). In our previous test, 8.8 mA electron extraction current was obtained with argon gas. In this work, by optimizing the magnetic field configuration to a resonant configuration, the performance of this ECR-PFG was greatly improved. With 100 W microwave power, an 80 mA electron current load was obtained under the extraction voltage of 0.1 kV. To minimize the metal contamination, a three-slit graphite plasma electrode was fabricated and a 50 mA load was generated at only 30 W RF power. During all tests, the gas consumption rate is lower than 0.6 sccm, which is beneficial to maintain the vacuum of implanter beamline.