| 摘要 |
A tumbling barrel plasma processing method and apparatus are presented. The tumbling barrel plasma processor includes a vacuum chamber, a plasma source, a power supply, a rotatable barrel which is disposed within the vacuum chamber and a barrel rotation mechanism for rotating the barrel. The plasma source generates a plasma surrounding the rotatable barrel. The barrel is made up of at least one conductive screen of a certain transparency that allows ions to pass therethrough. The power supply provides a negative voltage which is applied to the screens of the barrel to extract ions from a plasma surrounding the rotatable barrel. Alternately a positive voltage can be applied to the screens of the barrel to extract electrons from the plasma surrounding the rotatable barrel. The barrel is rotated by the barrel rotation mechanism such that the samples disposed within the barrel are tumbled, thereby the samples receive plasma treatment on all sides. Insulative samples can also be processed since the voltage is applied between the plasma and the screens and, since no voltage is applied directly to the samples themselves, there is no need to capacitively couple the voltage to the insulative samples. An advantage of the present method and apparatus is that the ions or electrons are coming from all directions due to the cylindrical symmetry of the electric field provided between the screens and the plasma. The ion current density is approximately the same for an ion beam of a plasma source ion implantation and the present invention, however the total ion current is higher for the present invention due to the large area of the rotatable barrel. Accordingly, throughput for the tumbling barrel plasma processor is much higher.
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