Department of Mathematics
Numerical Simulations of Process Models in Microelectronics Manufacturing
on Beowulf Clusters with High-Performance Networks
Matthias K. Gobbert
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Production steps in the manufacturing of microelectronic devices involve gas flow at a wide range of pressures. We develop a kinetic transport and reaction model (KTRM) based on a system of time-dependent linear Boltzmann equations. A deterministic numerical solution for three-dimensional kinetic models requires the discretization of the three-dimensional velocity space, the three-dimensional position space, and time. We design a spectral Galerkin method to discretize the velocity space by specially chosen basis functions. For the spatial discretization, we use the discontinuous Galerkin finite element method. As an application example, we simulate chemical vapor deposition at the feature scale in two and three spatial dimensions and analyze the effect of pressure. Finally, we present parallel performance results which indicate that the implementation of the method possesses excellent scalability on a Beowulf cluster with a high-performance Myrinet network. I will describe the hardware of this system in some detail and discuss general issues involved in the assessment of performance in parallel computing.
All interested persons are welcome.
The talk will be accessible to upper division students.