Nanoplas, a global supplier of plasma processing equipment to the semiconductor industry, today announced a new dry-etch process offering virtually unlimited etch selectivity for removing dielectric films on microprocessors and memories at high throughput.

Nanoplas’s new Atomic-Layer Downstream Etching (ALDE) processing allows etching rate and selectivity to be controlled independently, which provides virtually unlimited selectivity. Based on the company’s new inductively coupled plasma (ICP) source, ALDE features atomic-layer control at wafer-surface level. 

“Nanoplas’s Atomic-Layer Downstream Etching technology enables a new class of plasma-based etching and stripping processes at the 20nm technology node and beyond,” said Gilles Baujon, Nanoplas CEO. “By allowing virtually unlimited selectivity, ALDE will alleviate many of the challenges engineers face in manufacturing next-generation devices – and enable them to achieve higher yields – because the process window will be larger and will easily integrate with existing pre- and post-ALDE steps. This is a huge benefit and driver for IC manufacturing. Bringing a new generation of devices to production is all about having sufficiently large process windows to generate high yields.”

Nanoplas intends for ALDE to replace current wet and dry techniques for removal of the many critical silicon-nitride spacer films in most advanced transistor-formation technologies.

Nanoplas expects to release a first ALDE application for SiN etching in Q2.

Nanoplas is an equipment supplier to the semiconductor industry specialized in novel plasma process solutions for nanoelectronics. The company’s plasma-processing tools are used by leading microelectronics companies in North America, Europe and Asia. The company is based near Grenoble, in St-Égrève, France.