Xaver Klemenschits MSc Publications
Biography Xaver Klemenschits was born in Vienna in 1994. He studied Nanoscale Physics at the University of Birmingham, England, for which he received the degree of MSc in 2017. He joined the Institute for Microelectronics in August 2017, where he is working on topography simulation using different deposition and etching models.

Process technology computer aided design (TCAD) is essential in order to simulate the complex fabrication of advanced microelectronic structures. Due to demands of high efficiency and simplicity, process emulation techniques have become more important than ever before. These describe the effect of a fabrication step using only the geometric properties, gathered from experimental data or the results of physical simulations.

Traditional emulation algorithms are, however, strongly limited in their accuracy due to their reliance on explicit surface representations, while traditional simulation techniques, such as the level set (LS) method, are inefficient and suffer from numerical limitations.

In order to combine the advantages of the level set method — namely, robust merger and separation of material — with the efficiency of explicit methods, a geometric advection algorithm for the emulation of microelectronic fabrication processes has been developed [1]. Starting from an explicit surface, a geometric advection distribution is placed at every point on the initial surface to generate the final surface, as shown in Fig. 1. The level set values of the final surface are then calculated for every grid point on the level set, resulting in a valid final level set, as shown in Fig. 1 [2]. The robustness of the final surface description is guaranteed, as the LS automatically deals with potentially complex surface deformations. Additionally, since calculations are performed directly in the level set, no costly conversions to explicit surfaces are required, as the initial surface points can be generated cheaply from the LS grid.

The applicability to the emulation of modern semiconductor manufacture was shown on several high-aspect-ratio structures, as seen in Fig. 3. Since there are no strong limitations on the shape of a geometric distribution or the type of process which can be modeled, this new algorithm presents a promising alternative to traditional methods, combining the performance of explicit methods and the robustness of implicit surface descriptions.

[1] https://doi.org/10.23919/SISPAD49475.2020.9241678 [2] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cma.2021.114196 [3] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mee.2018.01.034