Selective etching mechanism of silicon oxide against silicon by hydrogen fluoride: a density functional theory study

Selective etching of silicon oxide (SiO₂) against silicon (Si) using anhydrous hydrogen fluoride (HF) vapor has been used for semiconductor device fabrication. We studied the underlying mechanism of the selective etching by density functional theory (DFT) calculation. We constructed surface slab models of SiO₂ or Si with different degrees of fluorination and simulated the four steps of fluorination. The calculations show relatively low activation energies of 0.72-0.79 eV for the four steps of fluorination of SiO₂, which are close to ∼0.69 eV observed in the experiment. The four-membered ring structure of -Si-O-H-F- in all transition states stabilized the system, resulting in relatively low activation energies. Thus, continuous etching of SiO₂ by HF is plausible at near-room temperature. In contrast, the fluorinations of Si showed relatively high activation energies ranging from 1.22 to 1.56 eV due to the less stable transition state geometries. Thus, negligible etching of silicon by HF is expected by the near-room temperature process. Our calculation results explain well the experimental observation of the selective etching of SiO₂ against Si by HF vapor.