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Plasma simulation for semiconductor etch and deposition

Plasma simulation shows you what the discharge inside a process chamber will do to the wafer. You can predict an etch or deposition profile before you build the chamber or switch the chemistry.

Talk to our Technical Experts

What plasma simulation does

  • Drive a process gas into a discharge and you don’t get a gas at one temperature. Electrons and ions spread across a range of energies. Near the wafer, in the sheath, neither one behaves thermally.

  • That sheath decides your profile. Ions do the etching, and the sheath field sets the energy and angle each one arrives with. Sidewall, depth and uniformity follow from those two numbers. A sheath model that’s off gives you a profile that’s off, whatever the chemistry says.

  • Without simulation, you find out by building the chamber and running it, or by switching a working tool to a new gas. Both cost tool time and wafers. Plasma modeling moves that sweep into software. That’s the job VSim, Silvaco’s plasma simulator, was built to do.

VSim Plasma

A kinetic plasma code built on particle-in-cell methods. It tracks electrons, ions and neutrals through a background gas at any pressure, with the elastic, excitation and ionization collisions between them. What you get back is the ion energy and angle distribution at the wafer.

In semiconductor processing

  • Plasma wafer etching Model the sheath field over the wafer and the dielectrics around it, which together set how evenly the ions arrive.
  • Magnetron sputtering Thin-film deposition, with target erosion and deposition profiles computed from the charged-particle physics.
See VSim Plasma

Plasma simulation applications

For Tech-X and VSim users

VSim is now part of Silvaco

Silvaco acquired Tech-X Corporation, the company behind VSim, in April 2025.

What hasn’t changed

VSim keeps its name, now as Silvaco’s plasma simulator. John Cary, CTO of Tech-X when the acquisition was announced, is now a Senior Director and Fellow at Silvaco.

Where VSim has already held up

Before you trust a plasma code with your chamber, you’ll want to know what it has run on and who has relied on it.

  • National-scale machines

    VSim has run on Artemis at the University of Sydney, Theta at Argonne National Laboratory, Cori at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Shaheen II at KAUST. It’s a parallel code, written to scale from a cluster up to the largest supercomputers.

  • Ion source modeling at CERN

    “A substantial amount of the value of the software was the support we received and the help setting up the ion source models. This has made VSim really useful for our research.”

    Bruce Marsh, Physicist, CERN

Plasma simulation webinars and talks

All webinars

Where to go next with VSim

  • Evaluating VSim

    Bring the chamber and the profile that won’t come out right. Silvaco’s application engineers help you set up the simulation and pull out the results you need to judge it.

    Talk to our Technical Experts

  • Reading the manual

    You’ll find the VSim documentation, with nearly 100 worked examples and tutorials, on txcorp.com.

    Read the VSim documentation

  • Already running VSim

    Open VSim cases in the Tech-X support portal. For other Silvaco tools, use Support and Downloads.

    Tech-X support portal Support and Downloads

Plasma simulation questions

Plasma simulation computes a plasma particle by particle rather than as one temperature-averaged gas. A particle-in-cell code moves charged particles and neutrals through their own self-generated fields and tracks the collisions between them. You get distributions, not averages. That matters, because a process plasma isn’t in thermal equilibrium.

It comes down to what hits the surface. For etch, that’s the energy and angle of each ion at the wafer, set by the sheath field. For sputter deposition, it’s the erosion pattern on the target and the deposition profile that follows. Change the chamber or recipe in the model and both shift before you touch the tool.

Through the ion flux at the wafer. VSim produces the particle distributions at chamber scale, and Victory Process reads them in to predict the etched feature. A change you make to the chamber carries straight through to the predicted device structure.

Tech-X Corporation became part of Silvaco in April 2025, and VSim carries on as Silvaco’s plasma simulator. Tech-X’s former CTO, John Cary, now holds a Senior Director and Fellow role at Silvaco. Existing VSim users still get support and licensing through txcorp.com.

Yes, on supercomputers. The code runs in parallel on HPC systems, and national-scale machines such as Theta at Argonne and Shaheen II at KAUST have hosted it. On GPUs, Silvaco has stated that Tech-X brings multi-node GPU algorithms into its portfolio. Talk to an application engineer before you size a cluster.

A full kinetic run is too slow to sit inside a co-optimization loop. Research shown at SURGE 2025 trains machine-learning models to bridge reactor and feature scales, which is the surrogate method FTCO uses on process data. More accurate digital twins were a stated goal of pairing Tech-X’s tools with Victory TCAD.

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