Preface Process and materials modeling in IC fabrication Modeling and simulation play signi®cant roles in the design and optimization of processes, equipment, and materials used in IC fabrication [1]. Many people believe that the pace and complexity of the industry necessitates the use of modeling in order to reduce costs, improve processes and products, and reduce their time-to-market. Many software tools for equipment and process simulation have been developed over the past decades, e.g. for bulk crystal growth, thermal CVD, plasma deposition and plasma etching [2]. Several are commercially available as powerful and user-friendly software packages. More recently, there has been a growing interest in predicting the changes in wafer state during processing, and the IC performance implications of those changes [3,4]. Software tools are becoming available as a result of these efforts, but are still undergoing rapid improvement in power and ¯exibility. Today's simulation tools have their roots in traditional ®elds of engineering modeling, such as computational ¯uid dynamics, molecular dynamics and computational chemistry. Researchers in these traditional areas of modeling continue to make signi®cant contributions in areas of interest to microelectronics. On the other hand, it has been evident for years that combining the expertise developed in several more traditional modeling areas will have the greatest impact on semiconductor materials processing. This is analogous to processing; i.e. expertise in traditional areas of focus is certainly useful, but combining expertise provides signi®cant bene®ts. With that in mind, this special issue, Process and Materials Modeling in IC Fabrication, was de®ned through conversations at the International Conference on Metallurgical Coatings and Thin Films (San Diego), the International Conference on Chemical Vapor Deposition and EuroCVD (Paris) and the American Vacuum Society (San Jose) meetings in 1997. The origin of the effort was the perceived need to introduce people to a range of modeling and simulation areas of interest to semiconductor materials processing. Knowing that not all topics related to process and materials modeling and simulation in microelectronics could be covered, we selected a connected subset, and invited contributions from experts in feature scale evolution, equipment scale modeling, reaction chemistry and materials modeling. Our request to the authors was to write about some of their recent contributions to the ®eld, while at the same time adding a `review ¯avor' to their paper. We wanted a `one stop shopping' place for people who want to be introduced to the state of the art in modeling and simulation in semiconductor materials processing. We also wanted to help people with expertise in one of these areas, that tend to be interdisciplinary in themselves, come `up to speed' in others areas. Thanks to the contributing experts, we think we have accomplished these goals, in the large. A team that brings together the expertise represented in this special issue would be well positioned to address a large number of modeling and simulation issues. On the other hand, even a casual glance at the titles, authors and abstracts might make one wonder why some topics are not included and why some leading experts are not represented. This is, of course, partly due to the background and bias of the editors. Also, as in other such endeavors, planning is not perfect, and execution is not perfect; i.e., we selected a reasonable maximum number of papers, and hoped the submitted manuscripts spanned the space to the desired degree. We hope that you will ®nd several of the contributions useful, either as part of your modeling and simulation efforts or as part of your `general interest' reading. Please feel free to send comments to either of us. Timothy S. Cale Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute USA Chris Kleijn Delft University of Technology The Netherlands January, 2000 References [1] K.F. Jensen, Micro-reaction engineering applications of reaction engineering to processing of electronic and photonic materials, Chem. Eng. Sci. 42 (5) (1987) 923±958. [2] M. Meyyappan (Ed.), Computational Modeling in Semiconductor Processing Artech House, Boston, MA, 1995. [3] Modeling of Film Deposition for Microelectronic Applications, in: S. Rossnagel, A. Ulman (Eds.), Thin Films, Vol. 22, Academic Press, New York, 1996. [4] T. Diaz de la Rubia (guest Ed.), Modeling and simulation in semiconductor processing, Journal of Computational Materials Science 12 (4) (1998) 289± 380. Thin Solid Films 365 (2000) 151 0040-6090/00/$ - see front matter q 2000 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved. PII: S0040-6090(00)00755-0 www.elsevier.com/locate/tsf