| During the past several years, for ultra-large scale integration or liquid crystal display panel manufacturing, large-area plasma sources are needed. In fabricating the electronic devices, such as etching, ashing or plasma chemical vapor deposition, the spatial uniformity of plasma sources are strongly required; besides overdense electrons and radicals are also required. Furthermore, in the fabrication of amorphous or crystalline silicon films, diamond film synthesis and carbon nanotube growth, the large-area overdense plasma source has also been useful. Among the various plasma devices, the planar-type surface-wave plasma (SWP) source is an advanced plasma source, which is a type of the promising plasma source satisfying the above rigorous requirements for the large-area plasma processing. Therefore, the development and application researches of the large-scale overdense SWP have attracted the unprecedented attentions. Furthermore, the current focus of the study is addressed on the efficient discharge and the spatial uniformity in large area.Mainly four aspects of the research contents in this thesis, in the context of which are related to generation mechanism, achievement channel, parameter character and numerical simulation, are described specifically as follows:1. According to the similar characteristics of overdense plasma and metal interacting with high-frequency electromagnetic waves, the surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) placed at the interface between overdense plasmas and dielectric is proposed. The generation mechanism of SWP is studied by analyzing the simplified SWP model, from which the spatial distribution characteristics of the surface electromagnetic waves are analyzed, the characteristic parameters of SPPs in overdense plasma are discussed, and especially the semi-analytical confirmation about the local electrical field enhancement in the interlayer with density gradient is presented.2. According to the microwave field distributed in the rectangular waveguide, the position of the cavern slot on the width waveguide wall is determined. Combining with the structure size of the SWP source, novel slot-array antennas are exploited. In order to achieve the purpose of coupling microwave energy efficiently and surface-wave discharge stably, in addition based on the resonant chamber theory and the dipole near-field radiation theory, the single-mode resonant chamber array and the subwavelength diffraction grating are designed, respectively. All those three parts consist of an efficient wave mode conversion device, which is the hard core of the SWP device to generate uniform and stable large area overdense plasmas. 3. The production of overdense SWP is verified as a stable discharge excited by surface electromagnetic waves which is carried by SPPs indeed, through experimenting on the SWP source with a multi-mode resonant chamber. By experimenting on the plasma source with the efficient wave mode conversion device, plasma density of 1.04×1018 m-3, spatial uniformity up to 85.7%, microwave absorption rate of 95% and efficiency ratio of 4.4 cm2/W are obtained under the lower input power of 200 W. Adding the bi-Maxwellian electron energy distribution and the stability and controllability of the plasma parameters, the overall performance of the proposed SWP occupy the global leader position in comparison with the similar sources.4. The spatial distribution of the surface wave excited by slot antennas is studied using a non-self-consistent uniform cold plasma model. The spatial distribution of the plasma parameters are simulated by using the self-consistent hybrid model, meanwhile the SWP with the characters of surface heating and plasma parameter diffusing effect is confirmed in comparing with the results of experimental measurement. The spatial distribution and the spatio-temporal evolution of the surface waves are arrived at by adopting the high-frequency electromagnetic simulation software (HFSS, CST), which explain the experimental phenomenon of the surface-wave discharge. The fruits achieved in numerical simulation provide the solid engineering basis and the useful reference for the construction of the next super-area SWP source.
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