A multistage smoothing algorithm for coupling cellular and polygonal datastructures

When cellular based topography simulation is coupled with polygonal data structures it is necessary to extract a triangular representation of the surface of the simulated structure after a deposition or an etching process from the cellular discretization. In this work an advanced multistage cellular postprocessing algorithm is presented which is capable of generating a smooth triangulated surface with a relatively small number of triangles even for practical applications in semiconductor process simulation. All structural edges are maintained by the smoothing algorithm while almost all artificial edges are removed from the surface discretization.