The increasing complexity of VLSI device interconnect features and fabrication technologies encountered by semiconductor etching and deposition simulation necessitates improvements in the robustness, numerical stability, and physical accuracy of the boundary movement method. The volume-meshbased level set method, integrated with the physical models in SPEEDIE, demonstrates accuracy and robustness for simulations on a wide range of etching/deposition processes The surface profile is reconstructed from the well-behaved level set function without rule-based algorithms. Adaptive gridding is used to accelerate the computation. Our algorithm can be easily extended from two-dimensional (2-D) to three-dimensional (3-D), and applied to model microstructures consisting of multiple materials. Efficiency benchmarks show that this boundary movement method is practical in 2-D, and competitive for larger scale or 3-D modeling applications.

No abstract

We demonstrate that accurate and robust physical simulation of etching and deposition in the semiconductor manufacturing technology can be achieved by using the collisionfree boundary movement method [l-31. Constraints for preserving physical accuracy, treatment of multiple junctions, adaptive gridding by quad/oct-tree meshes and experimental corroboration of void and stringer formation in 2D and 3D structures will be presented.

An uni ed strategy for achieving heterogeneous tool integration within the technology computeraided design (TCAD) realm is presented. Geometry, grid and surface mesh servers are de ned and implemented in a program that contains the di erent data and provides common services for TCAD applications. These services form the backbone of the integration framework. Functional abstraction is used to provide uni ed access to the servers' data and procedures. The role of each server and their interactions, including those with applications, are delineated. Existing tools such as SUPREM-IV and SPEEDIE, together with new tools have been integrated to illustrate the utility and versatility of the approach. This paper discusses the integration strategy, shows results and fully speci es standard functional server interfaces needed for TCAD tool integration.