| AVS 66th International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| Plasma Science and Technology Division | Monday Sessions |
| Session PS2-MoM |
| Session: | Plasma Modeling |
| Presenter: | Nicolas Mauchamp, Osaka University, Japan |
| Authors: | N. Mauchamp, Osaka University, Japan M. Isobe, Osaka University, Japan S. Hamaguchi, Osaka University, Japan |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
Since the invention of a transistor in the last century, the typical dimensions of semiconductor devices have diminished and are now reaching the atomic sizes. Plasma etching techniques have been widely used to manufacture semiconductor devices. However, as the device dimensions decrease and a wider variety of materials are used to form highly advanced devices, the precise control of device structures during the etching process has become extremely challenging. A better understanding of plasma-surface interactions during the etching process is expected to help one obtain the desired device structures and avoid unwanted effects such as damage formation during the etching processes. Plasma-surface interaction with surface chemical reactions and collision cascade due to energetic ion impact have been widely studied both experimentally and theoretically. Such interaction should be determined from atomic interactions among atoms and ions involved in the process, so that once the material properties of the surface and physical properties of incident ions and radicals are known, macroscopic surface reaction properties such as the etching rate and resulting surface chemical compositions should be predictable. However, the relation between such atomic properties and macroscopic process parameters are so complex that few (empirical) formulas exist that relate material properties and process properties (e.g., etching rate) and are valid under wide process conditions.
In this study, we consider a Lennard-Jones (LJ) solid, which is an FCC crystalline solid made of particles interacting through a simple two-body LJ potential function, and analyze its physical sputtering properties using Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulation. The goal of this study is to understand the dependency of the physical sputtering yield, a macroscopic and non-thermodynamic property of the material, on the interatomic potential functions [1]. In this presentation, we focus our discussion on the sputtering yields at high incident ion energies, where the sputtering yield depends sensitively on the repulsive potential of the surface atoms and incident ions. We also compare the simulation results with experimental sputtering yield data archived in Ref. [2], in an attempt to relate thermodynamical properties of the surface material and atomic properties of incident ions to the observed sputtering yield, based on an analogy to the sputtering properties of the LJ system that we analyze in detail in this study.
[1]N. A. Mauchamp, et al., AVS 65th International Symposium and Exhibition, PS-FrM05 (2018).
[2]Y. Yamamura and H. Tawara, Atomic Data and Nuclear Data Tables 62, 149-253 (1996).