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High-Rate and Smooth Surface Etching of Al 2 O 3 -TiC Employing Inductively Coupled Plasma (ICP)

1996; Institute of Physics; Volume: 35; Issue: 4S Linguagem: Inglês

10.1143/jjap.35.2512

1347-4065

Nobuto Fukushima, Hiroaki Katai, Toshiaki Wada, Yasuhiro Horiike,

Copper Interconnects and Reliability

High-rate and smooth surface etching of Al 2 O 3 -TiC, which is widely used as a slider material for magnetic recording heads, has been developed employing inductively coupled plasma (ICP). The etching rate of 200 nm/min was obtained with Cl 2 /BCl 3 mixture. However the etched morphology exhibited roughness around 40 nm Ra (arithmetic average deviation from center line) because of different etching rates for Al 2 O 3 and TiC grains in the substrate. The addition of Ar to the Cl 2 /BCl 3 improved both the etching rate and roughness of the etched surface considerably. As a result the high etching rate of more than 350 nm/min, which is more than ten times that of conventional Ar + ion etching, and relatively smooth surface roughness around 20 nm Ra were achieved with Ar/Cl 2 /BCl 3 mixture using 1.2 kW RF power and -500 V V dc .