Level Set Methods for Surface Advancement in Lithography, Etching and Deposition

We describe set of numerical techniques, known as level set methods, for computing the motion of surface evolution in etching, deposition, and lithography development. The techniques are robust, accurate, unbreakable, and extremely fast, and can be applied to highly complex surface evolutions. For example, calculation of the three-dimensional profile advancement for lithography development takes under 3 seconds on a 80 × 80 × 80 grid on a Sparc 10. We show the application of these techniques to a variety of process manufacturing problems, including flux/visibility integration laws, simultaneous etching and deposition, effects of non-convex sputter laws demonstrating faceting, ion-sputtered re-deposition and re-emission with low sticking coefficients.