Materials research is essential to enable the etching and deposition of high-quality thin films required for cutting-edge semiconductor and quantum devices. Inductively coupled plasmas (ICPs) are used in the semiconductor industry to enable rapid and uniform etching and deposition owing to their high density of energetic particles and reactive species. Due to an increasing need to minimize contamination in thin film growth, we hope to build an ultra high vacuum (UHV) compatible ICP source for our epitaxy system in the laboratory. In this study, we have built and tested a prototype high vacuum ICP by comparing the necessary RF power to strike argon plasma in various dielectric materials and RF coil configurations; we constructed coils of various geometries to compare the effects of number of turns on the pressure and power required to strike an argon plasma. It was found that more power is needed when the chamber pressure is higher and that a 6-coil ICP geometry was optimal for the test vacuum chamber. The newly constructed ICP enables the growth of III-V nitrides and etching of photonic oxide crystals in our laboratory.
