This Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is directed to the development of a novel planar excimer lamp. This lamp design offers numerous potential advantages over conventional cylindrical coaxial lamps which includes high irradiance (>100 mW/cm2), uniform area illumination, compact size, improves cooling, longer life, and lower cost. This lamp will be designed to be easily integrated able in tools used in the manufacture of electronic devices. Excimer lamp applications include in-situ reticule cleaning, in-situ pre-deposition cleaning, photochemical vapor deposition, and UV curing. Conventional UV lamps are inadequate for these tasks. Excimer lasers, which can easily illuminate a large field size, are often inadequate at integrating into a production tool, and have a very high cost of ownership. Three goals has been established to guide this work in: 1) design and fabricate a planar excimer lamp with novel electrode structure and lamp cell design, 2) evaluate the area uniformity of the narrow band excimer emission, and 3) measure the UV spectra, radiant power output, and efficiency of the lamp filled with KrCl* (222 nm) or XeCl*(308 nm). The technology, once successfully developed, will be used the semiconductor manufacturing industry.
