Electrostatic Particle-in-Cell/Monte-Carlo simulation of capacitively coupled plasma devices with varying external circuitry

We use a fully kinetic approach to simulate plasma formation and dynamics in capacitively coupled plasma devices commonly used for plasma etching in chip fabrication. In particular, the particle-in-cell method coupled with Monte-Carlo treatment of collisions (PIC/MCC), all contained within the software package called WarpX, is used to model a one-dimensional (1d3v) bounded plasma system. In this work, we couple a circuit model with PIC/MCC, to simulate an external circuit that is connected to the dri ven electrode. In a self-consistent fashion, the potential within plasma is affected not only by the current in circuit, but also by the plasma current, both building surface charge on electrodes. In practice, we used python interfaces to intercede in the WarpX PIC/MCC algorithm in order to implement the link between the external circuit and plasma. Different external circuitry elements in series are powered by single and dual radio-frequency power supplies, and spatial distribution of ion densities (helium and argon) are calculated.