Design of a 300 mm chemical vapor deposition tungsten reactor using computational fluid dynamics

Computer simulation is used to optimize the design of a 300 mm chemical vapor deposition tungsten reactor, in order to improve its concurrency of operations, relative to 200 mm designs. Typically, in tungsten sequential batch systems, some deposition stations sit idle while a newly loaded wafer is heated up and exposed to a protective silane flow. This idling is necessary to prevent the device attack and gas phase nucleation that can result from early introduction of WF6 to the chamber. In the 300 mm chamber design presented here, this problem is addressed by altering the chamber geometry to greatly improve the isolation of individual deposition stations. This allows incompatible processes to take place simultaneously on adjacent stations with minimal cross talk, providing a substantial improvement to the throughput of the system.