The surface charging effects in three‐dimensional simulation of the profiles of plasma‐etched nanostructures

Abstract

AbstractParticles and fields represent two major modeling paradigms in pure and applied science at all. Particles typically exist in a spatial domain and they may interact with other particles or with field quantities defined on that domain. A field, on the other hand, defines a set of values on a region of space. In this paper, a methodology and some of the results for three‐dimensional (3D) simulations that includes both field and particle abstractions are presented. In our studies, charging damage to a semiconductor structure during plasma etching is simulated by using 3D level set profile evolution simulator. The surface potential profiles and electric field for the entire feature were generated by solving the Laplace equation using finite elements method. Calculations were performed in the case of simplified model of Ar+/CF4 non‐equilibrium plasma etching of SiO2. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.