A 3D Virtual Reactor for Simulation of Silicon-Based Film Production

In this paper we introduce a Grid-based Virtual Reactor, a problem-solving environment that supports detailed numerical study of industrial thin film production in Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition (PECVD) reactors. We describe the physics and chemistry underpinning the deposition process, the numerical approach to simulate these processes on advanced computer architectures as well as the associated software environment supporting computational experiments. In the developed 3D model we took into account all relevant chemical kinetics, plasma physics and transport processes that occur in PECVD reactors. We built an efficient problem-solving environment for scientists studying PECVD processes and end-users working in chemical industry and validated the resulting Virtual Reactor against real experiments.Copyright © 2004 by ASME