Pathfinder: Using simulations to reduce industrial costs and the environmental consequences of plasma etching

The etching of silicon wafers using gaseous plasmas underpins the rapid advance in computer technology that has powered the global economy in recent years and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Currently, experimental testing is used to establish the relevant plasma mixes to generate the desired etch. Such testing is an expensive and time consuming process even for the relatively minor improvements in the processes required to drive the continued advance of the technology, whilst a radical change in the (feedstock) gas used to seed the plasma is extremely costly. In addition the silicon etching process accounts for significant emissions of gases such as SF6 and CF4 which have a global warming potential (GWP) many thousand times that of CO2. Innovations which can reduce emissions, such as by reducing the need for experimental testing, have clear cost, environmental and social benefits. The business concept is to develop a state of the art plasma simulation package which will determine the appropriate plasma mixes and parameters (or at the very least will negatively evaluate potential plasmas, thereby saving £100ks of industrial testing costs) using fundamental data generated from fully quantum mechanical calculations using methods developed at UCL. The current proposal is for some seedcorn funding to determine the size of the market and to develop an appropriate business model.