Dislocation modeling for the silicon world

We describe the challenges of modeling the behavior of dislocations which arise during the manufacture of semiconducting devices. Work on three prototype systems of increasing complexity is described, which shows that useful information about both the nucleation of dislocations and the final configurations that they achieve can be obtained. We conclude that dislocation modeling has advanced to the point where the chief remaining obstacle to understanding dislocation problems in real-life manufacturing situations is the difficulty of obtaining realistic three-dimensional stress fields from current process-modeling codes.