Simulation of Plasma Chambers for Predictive Simulation of Semiconductor Manufacturing

Process engineers, plasma chamber designers, and plasma device users are faced with the challenge of designing optimal geometric configurations, with uniformity over larger regions, more focused plasma etching distributions, and better powering characteristics.  Physical prototyping is untenable, given the expense of chamber manufacture and even switchover from one working gas/chemistry to another.  To understand these situations, kinetic (velocity-distribution capturing) simulations are required, as only they properly account for the non-thermal nature of the particle distribution – the electron distribution has energy dropouts at, e.g., ionization and excitation energies, while both the electron and ion distributions are highly non-thermal at the plasma edges, where there are sheaths with flows.

This webinar presents Silvaco’s plasma simulator VSim, which allows engineers to explore parameter space, test new geometries, and explore new processes for plasma devices without modifying their physical systems or their setup.  VSim uses a particle-in-cell (PIC) algorithm, which captures the full kinetics of the particle distributions.  VSim further generates the particle distributions in both the direct form of histograms and in a reduced form of overall and energy dependent von Mises-Fisher distributions that can be imported into Victory Process, a feature-scale simulator, for predicting semiconductor devices as manufactured.

What You Will Learn

• How to simulate plasmas, in particular etching chambers, and extract physical data, like the ion energy and angular distribution function.
• How waveforms can affect the ion distribution function that does the etching.
• How to build a complete workflow from geometry setup to process modeling for devices.

Presenter

John Cary
Senior Director and Fellow, Silvaco

John Cary is a Senior Director and Fellow at Silvaco specializing in plasma simulation and photonics simulation, as well as design of computational applications and workflows for plasma and photonics modeling.  John directs Silvaco’s TCAD/HPC group, which specializes in massively parallel computing for plasmas and electromagnetics, including photonics, combined with device (GPU) based computing, including on the cloud.  His technical interests include photonics, plasmas, and algorithm development.  John has a PhD in Plasma Physics from the University of California, Berkeley.  He is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and a former Chair of the Division on Plasma Physics of the APS.  He founded Tech-X Corporation, which was acquired by Silvaco in 2025.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Process engineers, plasma chamber designers, device fabricators, and engineering management.