Paper PS-TuP32
State-Space Mapping of Plasma Tools via Coarse Mesh Tool Simulation

Tuesday, October 29, 2013, 6:00 pm, Room Hall B

The physical processes underlying low-pressure, low-temperature industrial plasma tools encompasses substantial ranges of space and time. This presents significant difficult for simulation. Large processing tools produce atomic scale features with process times often exceeding 1000's of seconds while applied frequencies are typically in the MHz or even GHz range. Tractable simulations, therefore, must typically make a number of rang limiting assumptions. An extreme simplification which is often employed when probing large parameters spaces is the “global-model” approximation, where volume-averaged chemistry balance equations are solved over the parameter space of interest. Though this may be regarded as an extreme approximation in view of the complexity of typical processing tool geometries, careful consideration of the transport and loss effects often yields surprising agreement with experiment. However, these models do have limited potential and cannot hope to account for spatially dependent phenomena, which may play a significant role in many industrial processes. Spatially resolved simulations, on the tool level, are much less commonly employed for state-space exploration and are often restricted to limited regions of parameter space, or significantly simplified chemistries. However, as the prevalence of multi-core desktop computers continues to grow rapidly, it is not unusual for anengineer to have easy access to a great many processing cores. Utilizing relatively coarse mesh tool simulations, in conjunction with such computer resources now makes spatially resolved state-space mapping tool simulations feasible for short term investigations. In this poster we will present the results of such a study with an SF6etching chemistry done using the new Quantemol - Virtual Tool (Q-VT) plasma simulation package.