Fluid Modeling of a Very High Frequency Capacitively Coupled Reactor

Very High Frequency Capacitively Coupled Plasma (VHF-CCP) discharges have been studied extensively for semiconductor manufacturing applications for well over a decade. Modeling of these discharges however poses significant challenges owing to complexity associated with simulation of multiple coupled phenomena (electro-static/magnetic fields and plasma physics) over different scales and the representation of these phenomena in a computational framework. We present 2D simulations of a self-consistent plasma with the electromagnetic field represented using vector and scalar potentials. For a range of operating conditions, the ratio of capacitive and inductive power, calculated using empirical correlations available in the literature, are matched by adjusting both the electrostatic and electromagnetic fields in a decoupled manner. We present results using this model that demonstrate most of the important VHF-CCP discharge phenomena reported in the literature, such as electromagnetic wave versus electrostatic heating and its impact on plasma non-uniformity, wave resonances, etc. while realizing a practically feasible computational model.