Scaling of Capacitively Coupled Plasmas Properties up to 10s of kV Driving Voltages

Industry is utilizing Capacitively Coupled Plasma (CCP) discharges with voltage amplitudes in the 10s of kV range, or even higher. These discharges are essential for anisotropic high aspect ratio etching in semiconductor manufacturing, particularly for high-density memory production. Particle-In-Cell (PIC) modelling of the resulting high-density discharges is challenging due to resolution requirements over a wide range of plasma time and length scales. With a parallel and GPU accelerated 1D-3V PIC code, we explore the scaling of plasma profiles, ion velocity distribution functions impinging on the wafer, and electron energy distribution functions (EEDFs) in a low-pressure Argon CCP discharge with driving voltages from 1 to 32 kV. The resulting EEDFs exhibiting a very long tail of energetic electrons. Furthermore, the discharge is extinguished at high voltages when the sheath width becomes comparable in the gap size.