Patent ID: 6888040

Claim:
An abatement method for destroying fluorocarbons consisting essentially of gaseous fluorocarbons exhausted from a vacuum processing chamber in which a semiconductor substrate is processed, the method comprising the steps of: processing the semiconductor substrate in the vacuum processing chamber thereby producing gaseous reaction products including the gaseous fluorocarbons; flowing an exhaust gas containing fluorocarbons consisting essentially of the gaseous fluorocarbons from the vacuum processing chamber through a reaction chamber downstream of the vacuum processing chamber; introducing water vapor as a reactant into the exhaust gas proximate to the vacuum processing chamber in an amount effective to minimize recombination of dissociated fluorocarbons, hydrogen from the water vapor reacting with the dissociated fluorocarbons so as to form HF, and oxygen from the water vapor reacting with at least one of C, S and N in the exhaust gas to form at least one of the gases COx, SOx, and NOx, or a mixture thereof in gaseous form; and applying RF Power to the gas in the reaction chamber to generate a plasma in the reaction chamber which dissociates the fluorocarbons in the exhaust gas.