Efficiency Enhancement of PIC-MCC Modeling for Magnetron Sputtering Simulations Using GPU Parallelization

A particle-in-cell Monte Carlo collision (PIC-MCC) model is presented, parallelized to be suitable for magnetron sputtering simulations on general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs). To reduce the large computation time generally required to calculate particle-electromagnetic field interactions, a numerical algorithm is optimized to obtain the best performance with GPGPU parallelization. The efficiency and accuracy of the GPGPU parallelized PIC-MCC model are examined by comparing the calculated results and the corresponding computational time with analytical solutions and the computation time of the serial code, respectively. The erosion and deposition rates during sputtering predicted using this model are in good agreement with experimental results. The newly developed PIC-MCC model with GPGPU parallelization is thereby shown to be both efficient and accurate.