3D Simulations of Electromagnetic Fields in Nanostructures using the Time-Harmonic Finite-Element Method

TL;DR

This paper presents advanced 3D finite-element simulations of electromagnetic fields in nanostructures, demonstrating improved accuracy and efficiency for optical metrology and nanostructure design.

Contribution

It introduces a finite-element solver with higher order elements, adaptive refinement, and fast algorithms, outperforming existing methods in 3D electromagnetic simulations.

Findings

The solver achieves higher accuracy and faster computation times.

It effectively simulates light diffraction in complex nanostructured masks.

Performance benchmarks show significant improvements over traditional methods.

Abstract

Rigorous computer simulations of propagating electromagnetic fields have become an important tool for optical metrology and optics design of nanostructured components. As has been shown in previous benchmarks some of the presently used methods suffer from low convergence rates and/or low accuracy of the results and exhibit very long computation times which makes application to extended 2D layout patterns impractical. We address 3D simulation tasks by using a finite-element solver which has been shown to be superior to competing methods by several orders of magnitude in accuracy and computational time for typical microlithography simulations. We report on the current status of the solver, incorporating higher order edge elements, adaptive refinement methods, and fast solution algorithms. Further, we investigate the performance of the solver in the 3D simulation project of light diffraction off an alternating phase-shift contact-hole mask.