Radical Controlled Plasma and Its Application

The reactive plasma processing has played important roles in etching, deposition and surface modification and sustained the basis of all science and technological fields. However, the plasma processing has been developed by using external parameters of apparatus such as power, pressure and gas flow rate and so on in the industrial fields since the species, in particular, radicals in the plasma have not been able to be measured. For past 15 years, however, many diagnostics tools to measure radicals in reactive plasmas have been developed. Particularly, the measurement of radicals enabled to make a new approach for developing of plasma processing, where the plasma is precisely controlled on the basis of measured results of radicals. In this article, the radical controlled plasma and its application, where the high performances are obtained based on insights into behaviors of radicals in the reactive plasma, is described.