Atomistic feature scale modeling of the titanium ionized physical vapor deposition process

We develop a fundamental model to simulate the ionized physical vapor deposition process of a titanium barrier into submicron features. Using molecular dynamics techniques we calculate for typical energies the energy and angular dependent reaction rates of Ti+ with Ti and Ar+ with Ti including the distribution of the etched away particles. The interaction potential is based on Ackland’s model [G. J. Ackland, Philos. Mag. A 66, 917 (1992)] and is extended for particles with a kinetic energy up to 150 eV. The reaction rates are implemented into a cellular automaton feature scale simulator modeling the thin film growth. The reactor and plasma sheath conditions are described in a simple model providing the energy and angular distribution for the feature scale simulator. The multiscale model is applied to barrier deposition into a high aspect ratio feature with different substrate bias conditions. The results show that the barrier growth at high energy is dominated by kinetic energy driven processes.