Evaluation of Thick Silicon Nitride Film Properties at 300 mm Scale for High-Q Photonic Devices

This work evaluates thick silicon nitride (SiN) film properties using various inline and offline advanced metrology data analysis. The thick SiN films for photonic applications are typically prepared by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) and low-pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) techniques. Our present study combines high-volume inline and high-accuracy offline metrology to best characterize our thick SiN films. The developed SiN film compositional analysis has been carried out using inline X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) to get fast feedback on the composition and contamination of the film surface. Finally, we present a refractive index (n) comparison for annealed and unannealed PECVD/LPCVD wafers.