Evaluation of Multigrid as a Solver for Stress Analysis Problems in Semiconductor Process Simulation

In this paper, the performance of multigrid based solvers for the stress analysis problems in semiconductor process simulation has been investigated. The stress governing equations are based on the incremental Maxwellian formulation of viscoelasticity. Selected test problems are related to the thin film deposition and native film growing processes. Multigrid methods has been employed both as independent solvers and preconditioners for Krylov subspace methods. The convergence rates of the multigrid based solvers have been compared to some standard Krylov subspace iterative solvers, and analysed in terms of the geometry, the problem size and model parameters.