It has been revealed that ion bombardment energy and ion flux density play an essentially critical role in SiNx deposition process of PECVD in TFT-LCD production. Ion energy and ion flux density bombarding onto substrate surface are known to be extracted from waveform of RF applied to an electrode. Using this method, we investigated film quality of SiNx formed in the conventional parallel plate PECVD equipment. When N2 + H2 or N2 + Ar is employed as a carrier gas in source gas (SiH4 + NH3), we have defined normalized ion flux density as ion flux density divided by deposited SiNx molecule which must be increased to obtain high quality SiNx film while ion energy is suppressed at low level as not giving damages on the film surface. This technique has made it possible to securely form SiNx film (2500 ) featuring dielectric break-down field intensity of 8.5 MV/cm at 250 on a glass substrate with Cr gate interconnects of 1000 having vertical step struc-ture. One of the important factors to improve film quality of SiNx deposited in PECVD is to increase ion flux density while keeping ion bombardment energy low enough to protect growing surface against any damages. Using this technique inverse-staggered TFT-array featuring field effect mobility of 0.96 cm2/Vs has been demonstrated which gate insulator SiNx, non-doped a-Si: H and a-Si: H(n+) were formed continuously at the identical substrate temperature of 250.

The two most important parameters in reactive ion etching process, ion bombardment energy and flux, were extracted through a simple RF waveform measurement at the excitation electrode in a conventional cathode-coupled plasma RIE system. By using the extracted plasma parameters, damage and contamination in Si substrates induced by reactive ion etching in a SiCl4 plasma were investigated. A very convenient map representation of ion energy and ion flux was introduced in understanding the etching process occurring in the RIE system.