Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Plasma-Surface Interaction of Si and GaN

Abstract

Recently, plasma-surface interaction has been central to many manufacturing processes that employ silicon and other thin film devices for electronic, display or related applications such as microelectromechanical system (MEMS) devices. The primary focus of this paper is on Si and GaN device processing. We studied argon plasma etching using molecular dynamics simulations. We investigated the variations of the substrate temperature, ion energy, etch yield and uniformity of Si and GaN surfaces during argon impact and found that the mixing effect of atoms plays a very important role in plasma-surface interaction. The yield was proportional to the incident ion energy. The incident ion angle doesn't play a important role in the uniformity of Si and GaN surfaces.