Design and modeling of a microwave plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition system

Plasma processing of materials is one of the key technologies in modern industry. It plays an important role and is broadly used in different applications, such as fabrication of diamond films, amorphous silicon for solar panels, and integrated circuits for electronics industry. Compared with dc or low frequency RF discharges, microwave plasma processing provides faster deposition rate, lower temperature reactions, and is damage-free to the whole device. Microwave plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (MPECVD) is one of the commonly used methods in the microwave plasma systems. In this work, the design and development of a MPECVD system operated at a resonant frequency of 2.45 GHz have been conducted using numerical modeling based on the finite element method (FEM) and conformal finite difference time domain particle-in-cell (CFDTD PIC) simulation. With the numerical modeling, the MPECVD system could be designed and optimized to achieve a high efficiency coupling of microwave into the inner reaction chamber. Based on the design, the MPECVD system has been constructed and successfully employed for growing diamond films. The design methodology, simulation results, and experimental setups will be presented.