This document is a proposal to continue work which was initiated by Professor Manos while he was head of the Atomic Beam Studies at the Plasma Physics Laboratory of Princeton University. The neutral beam source at Princeton, though developed for studies of spacecraft materials, was quickly shown to be promising for fine-line, low-damage processing of semiconductors 1, a subject that has been under aggressive study in Japanese corporate research laboratories. The Princeton source, because of the way in which it was configured during design, was not suitable to examine a wide range of semiconductor process variables. To continue these semiconductor studies at William and Mary develop tools for wafer-scale production. This proposal is for a three year program of study which will integrate plasma measurement, experimental surface characterization, and computational modeling of low-energy, low-damage processing steps involving neutral atoms and molecules (and ions). The work will be performed at the College of William and Mary with close collaboration with a number of outside advisors from industry.
