Paper PS-ThP20
Modeling of Remote Plasma Sources using CFD-ACE+

Thursday, November 10, 2016, 6:00 pm, Room Hall D

Remote plasma processing typically involves plasma generation in a main chamber and the substrate activation (or etching or deposition) by plasma activated species outside the plasma zone to reduce damage to the substrate. The remote substrate location also enables control of plasma properties to a sufficient degree to preferentially result in a desired flux of species to the substrate. The CFD-ACE+ modeling platform can be used for simulations of remote plasma sources to address gas flow, heat transfer, plasma physics and chemistry and electromagnetics in a coupled fashion. In this paper, we report on computational modeling studies of plasmas sustained in Ar/N₂ and Ar/NF₃ mixtures using global and 2D simulations. The Kinetic Module of CFD-ACE+ is used to generate the electron energy distribution function (EEDF) and compute electron impact reaction rates and transport coefficients. The fast global models help isolate the major reaction pathways and help reduce the number of reaction steps of the volumetric mechanism for multidimensional simulations. At these pressures of interest, the back diffusion of injected Ar into the plasma zone results in activation of reaction pathways that result in feedstock dissociation. The effect of mixture ratios, power, frequency and pressure on the resulting plasma, ion and radical densities in the main reactor chamber, and fluxes of plasma species at the remote substrate are discussed.