Plasma etch considerations for the mega-bit DRAM.

During the past 18 months development of dry etch pattern transfer technology was done at the AT&T Bell Laboratories Device Development Line (DDL) at Allentown to support fabrication of the million- bit memory chip (MB DRAM). Reduction of the critical feature size to 1.00micron required novel plasma etch processes to be put in place to allow the timely and guaranteed manufacturability of the device. This paper gives some details of the plasma patterning considerations and the resulting processes that have allowed the MB DRAM to become a reality.