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A much greater number of useful precursors for plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) can be dispersed in high vapor pressure solvents than can be put into the vapor phase directly. In order to enable the use of such precursors, the authors investigated a method by which one can directly inject these liquids as microdroplets into low pressure PECVD environments. The solvent evaporates first leaving behind the desired precursor in the gas/plasma. The plasma dissociates the vapor and causes the deposition of a composite film (from precursor, solvent, and plasma gas). The authors made preliminary tests using Fe nanoparticles in hexane and were able to incorporate over 4% Fe in the resulting thin films. In addition, the authors simulated the process. The time required for a droplet to fully evaporate is a function of the background pressure, initial liquid temperature, droplet-vapor interactions, and initial droplet size. A typical evaporation time for a 50μm diameter droplet of hexane is ∼3s without plasma at 100mTorr. The presence of plasma can decrease the evaporation time by more than an order of magnitude. In addition, the model predicts that the temperature of the injected droplet first decreases by evaporative cooling (to ∼180K for hexane); however, once the solvent has fully evaporated/sublimated, the plasma heats any remaining solute. As a result the solute temperature can first fall to 180K, then rise to nearly 750K in less than 1s.

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Mask undercut in the time-multiplexed deep silicon etch process is becoming an increasingly significant issue as it is used to produce smaller critical dimension features. Models of the process must contain the necessary physics to reproduce the dependencies of mask undercut. We argue that the reason undercut develops is the dependence of the deposition step on ion flux. Our experiments of C4F8 (and CHF3 not shown) plasmas show that the film growth is dominantly ion-enhanced. This leads naturally to a mask undercut that increases in time. A more neutral flux dominant deposition step would result in reduced mask undercut.