It is essential for three-dimensional simulation of semiconductor technology process steps to be able to deal with non-planar surfaces which describe the complex geometry of modern devices. One of the methods for dealing with surfaces is the level set method. This method describes the propagation of material surfaces in the production processes of semiconductor technology processes such as etching and deposition. For this method we use a rectangle grid, and the needed surface information is calculated at each point of this grid. Examples for this surface information are the relative distance of the grid points to the surface and the relative speed of the surface.

A quick algorithm for calculating the distance of every grid point to the material surface is implemented. The complexity of this algorithm is O(rN + M), where N is grid points, M is the number of edges and vertices and r is calculation-effectivity dependent. This implementation and other future implementations are based on the Wafer-State-Server. This ensures compatibility with other tools developed at the institute.

Future work will also include surface grid generation. The quality of the volume grid generation depends on the generation of the surface grid, which must accurately represent the device geometry. This shows that surface grid generation has a crucial meaning for the whole simulation of the etching or deposition process.