Two-Dimensional Particle in Cell Simulation of Dual Frequency Effect in a Torrregime Capacitively Coupled Plasma

Capacitively coupled plasma (CCP) equipment has been widely used in semiconductor and display processing. Due to the strong nonlinearity in high-power CCPs, particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations are generally required to investigate the kinetic effects. However, dual-frequency (DF) CCPs are seldom analyzed with a multi-dimensional PIC simulation because of the heavy computational load. This study investigates the DF-driven CCPs in an actual equipment scale for the deposition process in a Torr-regime using a two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulation parallelized with a graphics processing unit [1]. We observed that the time-averaged plasma potential and the sheath thickness increase with the ion power absorption, increasing primarily with the low-frequency (LF) power. We also observed that the ion flux increases linearly with the LF power. Furthermore, the ion flux on the substrate keeps uniformity in the presence of the LF power while the electron density becomes nonuniform abruptly.

[1] M. Y. Hur, J. S. Kim, I. C. Song, J. P. Verboncoeur, and H. J. Lee, Plasma Res. Express 1, 015016 (2019).