Robust, stable, and accurate boundary movement for physical etching and deposition simulation

The increasing complexity of VLSI device interconnect features and fabrication technologies encountered by semiconductor etching and deposition simulation necessitates improvements in the robustness, numerical stability, and physical accuracy of the boundary movement method. The volume-mesh-based level set method, integrated with the physical models in SPEEDIE, demonstrates accuracy and robustness for simulations on a wide range of etching/deposition processes. The surface profile is reconstructed from the well-behaved level set function without rule-based algorithms. Adaptive gridding is used to accelerate the computation. The algorithm can be easily extended from two-dimensional (2-D) to three-dimensional (3-D), and applied to model microstructures consisting of multiple materials. Efficiency benchmarks show that this boundary movement method is practical in 2-D, and competitive for larger scale or 3-D modeling applications.