Trends in practical process simulation.

Process simulation has shown to be an important tool for the development in the fields of ULSI and power devices. The reason for this is that the traditional experimental method to optimize devices is no more sufficient because of the high costs and long times needed. With the aid of process simulation it is possible to predict the changes in dopant profiles and wafer topographies due to semiconductor processing steps. The results of process simulation are needed as input for the simulation of the electrical behavior of the device as well as for understanding the effects of successive process steps on wafer topography and dopant distributions. The main purpose of this paper is to sketch the present state of process simulation to give the reader a feeling of what can be gained and of what can be expected from process simulation.