No abstract

We present a topographic simulation platform that simultaneously considers three-dimensional surface movement, neutral and ion transport, and surface reactions in plasma high-aspect-ratio (HAR) oxide etching. The hash map data structure is considered for an effective 3D level set algorithm with parallelized computations to calculate surface moving speed. Neutral and ion transport within nanoscale semiconductor geometry is parallelized with a graphics processing unit (GPU) so that the speedup ratio as compared to a single central processing unit (CPU) is approximately 200. The surface reaction based on a two-layer model was incorporated into a 3D feature profile simulation platform with CPU parallelization. Finally, our simulation platform demonstrates that adaptive surface meshing can drastically decrease the computational load with a parallelized numerical platform.

We propose a universal surface reaction model without any ad-hoc assumptions for fluorocarbon (FC) plasma oxide etching. A self-consistent numerical algorithm was developed to predict the deposition and etch yields simultaneously from our model considering the passivation layer and mixed layer. The internal model variables such as surface coverages showed consistent results under a wide range of FC plasma conditions. This model predicts the transition conditions between deposition and etch yield and the FC passivation layer thickness during the etching process. Finally, quantitative verification of the proposed model was performed through comparison to various FC plasma experimental data.