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Darnon, Maxime; Cunge, Gilles and Braithwaite, Nicholas St.J
(2014).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1088/0963-0252/23/2/025002
Abstract
The resurgence of industrial interest in pulsed radiofrequency plasmas for etching applications highlights the fact that these plasmas are much less well characterized than their continuous wave counterparts. A capacitively coupled planar probe is used to determine the time variations of the ion flux, electron temperature (of the high-energy tail of the electron energy distribution function) and plasma density. For a pulsing frequency of 1 kHz or higher, the plasma never reaches a steady state during the on-time and is not fully extinguished during the off-time. The drop of plasma density during the off-time leads to an overshoot in the electron temperature at the beginning of each pulse, particularly at low frequencies, in good agreement with modeling results from the literature.