T. Smy et al., Efficient modeling of thin film deposition for low sticking using a three-dimensional microstructural simulator, J VAC SCI A, 19(1), 2001, pp. 251-261
Modern deposition methods for the thin metal films used in very large scale
integrated diffusion barriers take advantage of nonunity sticking effects
to produce more uniform coatings. Modeling these processes at the feature s
cale can be challenging due to long execution times which arise from the ne
ed to solve self-consistently for the transport of material in the feature.
This articlepresents a methodology for substantially decreasing the execut
ion time for low sticking coefficient simulations. The method is a modifica
tion of the traditional sequential Monte Carlo technique in which there is
a separation of the transport processes and deposition process. This allows
for a normalization of the incident flux magnitude before deposition and a
substantial improvement in execution time. The article presents the incorp
oration of this method into a three-dimensional microstructural simulator,
3D-FILMS. The simulator is first used to confirm the accuracy of the new me
thodology and then assess its improvement over the more traditional algorit
hm. Finally, simulations for chemical vapor-deposited W and for sputtered T
i deposition are presented. (C) 2001 American Vacuum Society.