9312134 Khargonekar This proposal is part of a major effort by systems/control and solid state electronics specialists to advance the application of control and systems theory to real time feedback control of semiconductor manufacturing equipment. We have chosen Reactive Ion Etching (RIE) as our initial research vehicle. This proposal describes fundamental research necessary for the application of real time control systems theory and technology to RIE. Our overall goal is to redesign the RIE machine for enhanced controllability and improved performance. We believe that this research program has the potential of offering dramatic improvement in the performance characteristics of RIE as measured by attainable feature size, uniformity of wafer processing, and yield. ***
