Comparison of Plasma Properties in DC and RF Magnetron Sputtering Using GPU-Parallelized PIC-MCC

Magnetron discharges are utilized for physical vapor deposition (PVD) processes of metal and composed thin films in various industrial applications [1]. The magnetron discharge is mainly operated as a direct current (DC) or radio frequency (RF) discharge. In this study, Ar/Cu plasmas in both DC and RF magnetron sputtering in a PVD chamber with a magnet at low pressure have been investigated by using our in-house GPU parallelized Particle-in-Cell Monte Carlo collision (PIC-MCC) program “PiCHY” [2, 3]. To facilitate the plasma analysis in the PVD chamber, the magnetized motion has been implemented in PiCHY by adopting the Boris method, coupled with the implicit method [4]. In the Ar/Cu magnetized plasma simulation, electrons and two positive ions (Ar⁺ and Cu⁺) are considered as charged species. It is found that the RF magnetron discharge is primarily sustained by the stochastic heating, whereas the DC magnetron sputtering discharge is by the ionization due to secondary electrons. Simulation results will be demonstrated at the conference.



[1] J. T. Gudmundsson, Plasma Sources Sci. Technol. 29, 113001 (2020).

[2] J. S. Kim, et al, 77th Annual Gaseous Electrics Conference, DF.100003 (2024).

[3] K. Denpoh et al, Jpn. J. Appl. Phys. 64 04SP65 (2025).

[4] V. Vahedi et al, Plasma Sources Sci. Technol. 2 261 (1993).