Numerical Investigation of RF Pulsing Effect on Ion Energy Distributions at RF-biased Electrodes

Abstract

The ion energy distributions (IEDs) arriving at a substrate strongly affect the etching rates in plasma etching processes. In order to determine the IEDs accurately, it is important to obtain the characteristics of radio frequency (rf) sheath at pulsed rf substrates. However, very few studies have been conducted to investigate pulsing effect on IEDs at multiple rf driven electrodes. Therefore, in this work, we extended previous one-dimensional dynamics model for pulsed-bias electrodes. We obtained the IEDs using the developed rf sheath model and observed that numerically solved IEDs are in a good agreement with the experimental results.