Conclusion

The aim of this article was to show the advantages and some of the limitations of plasma-assisted ALD processes. Overall, plasma assistance offers greater flexibility, but also adds complexity to the process by adding numerous parameters. Nevertheless, plasma assistance is essentially limited to the use of atomic radicals resulting from the decomposition of reactive gases, O ₂ or H ₂ for example, and many plasma components have not (metastables, photons...) or hardly (ions) been studied in the case of ALD process assistance, which still leaves room for a wide exploratory field. The impact of walls on the PEALD process also remains to be understood, since plasmas and radical density are known to be impacted by the nature of the walls (e.g. modification of recombination coefficients at the walls)....