Products
Syndion Product Family
Deep Reactive Ion Etch (DRIE)Reactive Ion Etch (RIE)
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Syndion Product Family
Deep silicon etch refers to plasma-based processes that remove silicon, creating features that can be many orders of magnitude larger than those in advanced transistors and memory cells.
The Syndion® product family from Lam Research is optimized to deliver deep silicon etch with the depth and cross-wafer uniformity control required to achieve precision.
Industry Challenges
Deep silicon etch is a critical process for manufacturing advanced chips that power a wide range of applications, including mobile devices, smart cars, and power grid and energy sectors. It is used to create larger and higher aspect ratio features such as through-silicon vias and trenches:
- Through-silicon vias (TSVs) are vertical structures that create electrical connections through a die or wafer. A key solution for advanced packaging, including heterogeneous integration, TSVs require excellent profile control, high within-wafer uniformity, and high productivity.
- Deep trench structures used in complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) image sensors face similar challenges, requiring smooth sidewall profiles with stringent taper control. Depth uniformity, CD uniformity, and mask selectivity are also essential.
- Large open area and high aspect ratio trench structures in advanced power devices poses additional challenges in controlling profile and uniformity cross wafer, as well as improving productivity for high volume manufacturing.
One approach for creating these structures is to quickly switch between etch and deposition steps during the manufacturing process, thereby carving the feature and layering material on the walls to protect them. However, this has become more challenging in recent years, due to increasingly higher aspect ratios, new materials being introduced, and tighter dimensional requirements in the manufacturing process.
In addition, chipmakers often have to choose between unwanted scallops – the features that result from alternating etch and deposition steps – and etch rate. Scallop size can be decreased, but at the expense of productivity needed for cost-efficient manufacturing.
Syndion’s enhanced source, chamber hardware, and process capabilities provides the precision solution chipmakers require to support deep silicon etch applications.
Key Customer Benefits
- Rapidly alternating process (RAP) delivers precise depth uniformity for trench aspect ratios
- Low cost of ownership due to high etch rates, excellent repeatability, and in-situ etching of multiple materials in the TSV stack (silicon, dielectrics, and conducting films)
- Superior cross-wafer critical dimension (CD) uniformity, depth uniformity, and profile control for advanced power trench device performance and wafer yield
- Best-in-class productivity and manufacturing performance, leveraging learnings from Lam’s full suite of RIE systems
Product Offerings
- Syndion® C
- Syndion® F-Series
- Syndion® G-Series
Key Applications
- TSV for high bandwidth memory and advanced packaging
- High aspect ratio structures for CMOS image sensors
- Large open area and high aspect ratio structures for advanced power devices, analog integrated circuits (ICs), microelectromechanical (MEMS) devices and wafer backside processing