Transport of Sputtered Particles in Capacitive Sputter Sources

Abstract

The transport of sputtered aluminum inside a multi frequency capacitively coupled plasma chamber is simulated by means of a kinetic test multi-particle approach. A novel consistent set of scattering parameters obtained for a modified variable hard sphere collision model is presented for both argon and aluminum. An angular dependent Thompson energy distribution is fitted to results from Monte Carlo simulations and used for the kinetic simulation of the transport of sputtered aluminum. For the proposed configuration the transport of sputtered particles is characterized under typical process conditions at a gas pressure of p=0.5 Pa. It is found that -- due to the peculiar geometric conditions -- the transport can be understood in a one dimensional picture, governed by the interaction of the imposed and backscattered particle fluxes. It is shown that the precise geometric features play an important role only in proximity to the electrode edges, where the effect of backscattering from the outside chamber volume becomes the governing mechanism.

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Machine learning plasma-surface interface for coupling sputtering and gas-phase transport simulations
• Physics-separating artificial neural networks for predicting initial stages of Al sputtering and thin film deposition in Ar plasma discharges
• Physics-separating artificial neural networks for predicting sputtering and thin film deposition of AlN in Ar/N${}_2$ discharges on experimental timescales
• Particle-in-Cell/Test-Particle Simulations of Technological Plasmas: Sputtering Transport in Capacitive Radio Frequency Discharges
• Kinetic simulation of electron cyclotron resonance assisted gas breakdown in split-biased waveguides for ITER collective Thomson scattering diagnostic
• An efficient plasma-surface interaction surrogate model for sputtering processes based on autoencoder neural networks