The effect of a blocking capacitor on ion energy distribution function in multi-electrode dual frequency capacitively coupled Ar plasma

Controlling the ion energy distribution function (IEDF) on the wafer is essential in the semiconductor etching process. Dual-frequency capacitively coupled plasmas (DF-CCPs) control the ion flux and ion energy separately with the variations of high frequency (HF) and low frequency (LF) power, respectively. The blocking capacitor is connected to a powered electrode to generate a DC self-bias affecting the IEDF. It is well known that the DC bias is constant in the steady state in a single frequency[1], but the self-bias by multi-electrode and dual frequency is not well studied yet. In this study, we developed the external circuit model for many electrode systems, and the IEDFs by the blocking capacitor in DF-CCPs were analyzed using a two-dimensional particle-cell simulation parallelized with GPU [2,3].