Kinetics Modeling And 3-Dimensional Simulation Of Plasma Etching

Plasma etching has been widely used in IC manufacturing and MEMS processing, it’s one of the major etching technology. Developing plasma etching simulator can reduce the design and develop cost of IC and MEMS devices. Through changing different etching conditions, like ion energy, ion angle distribution, we can select the best process condition.Plasma etching is happened in plasma; a large number of charged ions accelerated by the electric field which perpendicular to the silicon surface, and incident directly to the silicon surface, where physical sputtering happened. At the same time, strong chemical reactions occur between plasma and the film surface. The product which can be volatized was taken out by the vacuum system. With the circulation of "reaction-peeling-emission" on the surface, substrate was etched into a certain depth.A profile simulator was developed based on a mixing-layer surface kinetic model. Major work of this dissertation was listed as below:1. Work out the numerical solution of the mixing-layer kinetic model with numerical analysis method, and incorporated into the 3-Dimensional Monte Carlo profile simulator with a cell-based representation.2. Etching profile under different etching conditions were obtained, including different natural to ion flux ration, different ion energy, etc. The etching profile was compared with experimental result. The difference of profile between different etching conditions was discussed.3. Factors which cause nonideal effects during etching were analyzed, including ion reflection, ion angle distribution, mask profile, etc. At last, RIE lag was discussed briefly.This profile simulator used in this dissertation would be useful for the research of micro-nanofabrication processing simulation.