Advanced Pic-Mcc Simulation for an Intermediate-Pressure Capacitively Coupled Plasma for Deposition Process

Abstract

A particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation has been usually utilized for observing plasma kinetics in low pressure [1]because of long simulation time as PIC uses a huge amount of computational particles to treat collisions with neutral gas using Monte Carlo collision (MCC) method. In order to simulate high or intermediate pressure discharges, there are three limitations which slow down the total computation time: (1) many simulation particles are needed as plasma density increases. (2) a very short time step is required in MCC process. (3) many collisional reactions should be included. To overcome these limitations, we approach in three ways: (1) parallelization of PIC simulation with Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), (2) improvement of MCC method, (3) and combination with a fluid model for heavy particle collisions. In this presentation, ion transport phenomena are investigated at the wafer edge in a capacitively coupled plasma (CCP) reactor under an intermediate pressure of a few Torr. The effects of waferfocus ring gap, focus ring height, and the dielectric constant are investigated on the neutral and the ion fluxes and the ion energy and angle distribution (IAEDF), and compared with the preceded results [2–3]for the effect of the wafer-focus ring property.