Software for Designing Plasma Reactors for Microelectronics

Outer-space plasmas and arc-jet plasmas are well known to many researchers at NASA. Efforts to understand the structures of these plasmas have consumed years of research at various NASA laboratories. Computational modeling of such plasmas involves analyses of multicomponent, multitemperature flows, and many computer codes developed by NASA are available for this purpose. Now, researchers at Ames Research Center have applied their expertise to understand a different kind of plasma — the kind used in manufacturing integrated circuits.