SBIR Phase I: Simulation of Rapid Thermal Processing in a Distributed Computing Environment

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9860814 This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project proposes to develop and demonstrate a computational tool for detailed simulation of Rapid thermal processing (RTP) in a distributed computing environment. RTP has become a key technology in the fabrication of advanced semiconductor devices. As wafers get larger and chip dimensions smaller, the understanding of the highly coupled physics such as radiative heat transfer, transient fluid flow and heat transfer as well as chemical reactions through numerical modeling using high-performance computing is the key to the design, optimization, and control of RTP reactors. In Phase I, a novel radiation model will be developed to take into account surface radiation with any level of radiative complexity. The microscale radiative properties of patterned wafers will be predicted by a microscopic model. The transient fluid flow, heat transfer, and chemical reaction equations are then solved using an unstructured finite volume method. The main vehicle for parallelism is to use a Recursive Coordinate Bisection (RCM) method to decompose the computational domain into sub-domains, which are distributed among a network of computers. Message passing among the computers will be provided through the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) library. The Phase I will demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed simulation tool on two-dimensional problems. In Phase II, the tool will be extended to consider some other physics and dynamic load balancing strategy on a network of computers will also be implemented. The proposed simulation tool will significantly benefit the semiconductor manufacturing equipment industries, which require a detailed understanding of multimode and highly coupled transport phenomena. The potential applications include the design, optimization, and control of RTP reactors and many other manufacturing and materials processing systems.