Development of a parallelized two-dimensional axisymmetric capacitively coupled plasma simulator using graphics processing units

Summary form only given. As a result of the development of the plasma-assisted nano-electronics processing, there are lots of efforts that diagnose and analyze the plasma phenomena using computer simulation for the plasma sources as well as the plasma-surface interactions for the nano-scale feature. However, increasing wafer size as well as minimized feature size makes it hard to simulate the whole system. Therefore, there is a study to utilize the graphic processing units (GPUs) for the parallelization of particle-in-cell (PIC) plasma simulators [1]. PIC simulation is accurate but needs heavy calculation as it takes quite long time to calculate the dynamics and collision processes of all the computational particles. Especially, a larger size chamber with 450 mm wafer is more difficult to simulate using PIC method. Recently, heterogeneous computing, which uses graphics processing units or other device with or without CPU for computing, has gradually distributed to various computing fields including physics and fluid dynamics. In this presentation, a two-dimensional axisymmetric simulator for capacitively coupled plasma (CCP) sources is presented with the performance improvement using GPUs. The improvement of speed compared with that of single CPU calculation.