Kanken Techno, a dedicated gas abatement system manufacturer is going to develop a high-efficiency abating system by low-pressure plasma jointly with Tokyo University. The development was adopted as a new subject in the proposed projects for the research and development (2016) selected by Japan Science and Technology Agency. The R&D expenses in the amount of 200 million yen at maximum will be subsidized for a period of 3 years at longest from now on.

The new technology adopted this time has been developed by Takanori Ichiki professor and others of Tokyo University Graduate School of Engineering who are majoring in the material technology. It is a technology of the treatment in which a PFC gas is directly applied to plasma under the low pressure of 10kPa or so which does not require a substantial reduction of nitrogen to dilute waste gas or heating of pipes.

The conventional abatement system of atmospheric plasma makes it possible to discharge plasma at several thousand times under an atmospheric pressure by electric output, and such hardly decomposable substances as CF4, SF6 and N2O can be decomposed so effectively that it is extensively used in the gas treatment of etching processes. However, as the gas flown out of the etching process is diluted by nitrogen about hundredfold for safety purposes and then decomposed at a high temperature, most of the energy is used to heat the nitrogen which was applied for dilution.
Furthermore, the rise of running cost has turned out to be an issue in case of abatements under the atmospheric pressure like the full-time heating of pipes to prevent adhesion of products on exhaust pipes in the processing devices.

In future, in order to generate plasma stably and uniformly under a reduced pressure around 10kPa, the company aims to develop a high-efficiency abatement system with improved running costs by means of proceeding with the research of electrode structure and power source specifications.

Kazuhiro Maekawa a department manager of Sales Division shows ambition to develop a new system, saying, “We aim for our development on a scale of several years’ period.”