AVS 62nd International Symposium & Exhibition
    Plasma Science and Technology Tuesday Sessions
       Session PS2-TuA

Invited Paper PS2-TuA1
Realistic Plasma Etch Simulation for High Aspect Ratio Contact Hole using Graphics Processing Units

Tuesday, October 20, 2015, 2:20 pm, Room 210B

Session: Plasma Modeling
Presenter: Yeon Ho Im, Chonbuk National University, Republic of Korea
Correspondent: Click to Email

With the continuous decrease in nanoscale design dimensions, semiconductor plasma processing is confronting the limits of physicochemical fabrication routes at the atomic scale. Especially, one of the emerging challenges is to achieve the ideal high-aspect ratio nanostructures without abnormal profiles, such as cylinder capacitors, shallow trench isolation, through-silicon vias. In spite of significant contributions of research frontiers, these processes are still unveiled due to their inherent complexity of physicochemical behaviors, and gaps in academic research prevent their predictable simulation. To overcome these issues, a Korean plasma consortium began in 2009 with the principal aim to develop a realistic and ultrafast 3D topography simulator of semiconductor plasma processing coupled with zero–D bulk plasma models. In this work, aspects of this computational tool are introduced. The simulator was composed of a multiple 3D level-set based moving algorithm, zero-D bulk plasma module including pulsed plasma processing, a 3D ballistic transport module, and a surface reaction module. The main rate coefficients in bulk and surface reaction models were extracted by molecular simulations or fitting experimental data from several diagnostic tools in an inductively coupled fluorocarbon plasma system. Furthermore, it is well known that realistic ballistic transport is a simulation bottleneck due to the brute-force computation required. In this work, effective parallel computing using graphics processing units was applied to improve the computational performance drastically. Finally, it is demonstrated that 3D feature profile simulations coupled with bulk plasma models can lead to better understanding of abnormal behaviors, such as necking, bowing, etch stops and twisting during high aspect ratio contact hole etch.