Multiscale three-dimensional CFD modeling for PECVD of amorphous silicon thin films

The development of a three-dimensional, multiscale computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model is presented here which aims to capture the deposition of amorphous silicon thin films via plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD). The macroscopic reactor scale and the microscopic thin film growth domains which define the multiscale model are linked using a dynamic boundary which is updated at the completion of each time step. A novel parallel processing scheme built around a message passing interface (MPI) structure, in conjunction with a distributed collection of kinetic Monte Carlo algorithms, is applied in order to allow for transient simulations to be conducted using a mesh with greater than 1.5 million cells. Due to the frequent issue of thickness non-uniformity in thin film production, an improved PECVD reactor design is proposed. The resulting geometry is shown to reduce the product offset from similar to 25 nm to less than 13 nm using identical deposition parameters. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.