Major Task:
Predictive Process, Property, Performance Models

Sub-task:
Modeling and Simulation of Integrated Circuit Processing and Performance

Primary Investigators:
Professor Timothy Cale

A primary focus of this task during the next year will be the continued development of modeling and simulation tools that can be used to predict the structure and properties of proposed interconnect technologies and assist in the development of fabrication techniques. To accomplish this goal, we will continue our efforts to develop modeling approaches and software tools to represent polycrystalline solids, such as metal conductors in ICs. We call our approach a “grain-continuum” representation, because the grains are stored as if they were bounded continua while the grain boundaries are also kept. Information about the details of the film is kept in a statistical sense. This allows fairly efficient storage while allowing atomistic and nanometer scale phenomena to be studied by “re-atomating” portions of the grain-continuum model. Thus, one major activity will be to develop models and software to convert between discrete atomistic and grain-continuum representations. Another major activity will be the continued development of models and software at the grain-continuum scale to evolve multiple materials in 3D using level set methods. We will focus on demonstrating island evolution through coalescence to blanket film creation. This involves the refinement of tools for interface extraction between multiple materials, association of properties with grains or material domains and the development of a framework for including constitutive models for growth rates.

We have made significant progress over the last few years. Next year, we will continue to introduce physical models for materials and processes to validate our approach, both for the conversion between discrete and continuum representations, and for the evolution of regions in the grain-continuum framework. After validation of our approach, our simulation framework will be available for materials scientists and process engineers to test their materials and process models. As we approach completion, this framework and associated models will be interfaced with property and performance software, in order to realize our goal to relate materials properties and processing details to the performance of complex, multiple material systems. Over the next year, we will start atomistic/molecular simulations to start predicting electronic transport in novel proposed molecular wires, and the effects of surface chemistry on adhesion and interfacial properties for additive processing and selective deposition on templated surfaces. This will involve molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo, and quantum mechanical simulations.

TASK Ib PG 2