Event
ECE Colloquium Series - Alexander Jurkov, MKS Instruments
Friday, November 7, 2025
3:30 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building, Room 1110
Darcy Long
301 405 3114
dlong123@umd.edu
Talk Title: Challenges and Advances in Radio Frequency Power Conversion for Semiconductor Plasma Applications
Abstract: Radio frequency (RF) plasma technology is essential in modern semiconductor fabrication, enabling precise processes such as etching and deposition. As the industry advances toward increasingly complex three-dimensional structures and smaller nanoscale features, the demands on plasma-based processing continue to grow. Meeting these demands requires a new generation of RF power conversion and control systems that are robust, accurate, agile, and efficient. Key challenges include delivering precise power across wide dynamic ranges and frequencies, operating under rapidly varying load impedance conditions, maintaining high power efficiency, and incorporating advanced sensing and system analytics. These requirements reveal fundamental limitations in conventional RF power delivery systems.
This presentation offers a brief overview of key plasma processes and typical inductively and capacitively coupled plasma systems. It highlights the core RF power challenges encountered in these platforms and presents recent innovations aimed at addressing them. These include RF inverter designs that maintain high efficiency under varying load conditions, scalable power combining techniques for rapid power control, and phase switched impedance modulation (PSIM) for high-speed impedance matching and transformation. Together, these advances support the development of next generation RF power architectures that enable more capable and efficient semiconductor plasma processing systems.
Bio: Alex Jurkov received the B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering from the University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada, and the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA. Since 2019, he has been a Senior Principal Scientist in the Advanced Development Group at MKS Instruments, Rochester, NY, where he leads research on next-generation RF power delivery systems for plasma processing. He is also a Visiting Research Scientist at MIT’s Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems. His research interests include high-efficiency RF power converters, phase-switched impedance modulation (PSIM), high-bandwidth tunable matching networks, and embedded mixed-signal control systems for semiconductor manufacturing.
