Three-dimensional modeling and simulation of dry etching process

In this paper, we report the development of the three-dimensional topography simulator, 3D-SURFILER (SURface proFILER) for the estimation of topographical evolution of the surface during a dry etching process. The cell-removal algorithm was employed to represent the surface evolution. The surface reaction and visibility with shadow effect were taken into account in our spillover calculation. Our simulations for the typical trench structure with 36, 000(30 x 40 x 30) cells take about 20 minutes with 10 Mbytes memory on SUN ULTRA 1. As a test vehicle, we present the simulations of reactive ion etching (RIE) and anisotropic dry etching of which the aspect ratio is 1.57 and 0.27, respectively.