Simulations of ion transport in a collisional radio-frequency plasma sheath

Summary form only given, as follows. RF gas discharges are widely used in the microelectronics industry, such as stripping of photoresists, depositing of organic and inorganic thin films, and anisotropic etching of semiconductors, oxide and metal surfaces. A self-consistent dynamics model suitable for describing collisional RF sheaths driven by a sinusoidal current source is proposed. This model retains all the time-dependent terms in the ion fluid equations, which is commonly ignored in some analytical models and numerical simulations of collisional sheaths for simplifying the ion dynamics. Additionally, an equivalent circuit model is coupled to the fluid equations in order to self-consistently determine the relationship between the instantaneous potential at an RF-biased electrode and the sheath thickness.