ROBUST, STABLE, AND ACCURATE BOUNDARY MOVEMENT FOR PHYSICAL ETCHING AND DEPOSITION SIMULATION

The increasing complexity of VLSI device interconnect features and fab rication technologies encountered by semiconductor etching and deposit ion 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 model s in SPEEDIE, demonstrates accuracy and robustness for simulations on a wide range of etching/deposition processes The surface profile is re constructed from the well-behaved level set function without rule-base d algorithms, Adaptive gridding is used to accelerate the computation, Our algorithm can be easily extended from two-dimensional (2-D) to th ree-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.