SIGLO-RF is a 1-D fluid model of radiofrequency excited,
capacitively coupled discharges for electropositive or electronegative gases. Electron and
ion transport is described using continutiy and momentum transfert (drift-diffusion)
equations. An energy equation is also solved for electrons. Ionization frequency (and
frequencies for energy exchange and momentum exchange) is supposed to depend on the local
mean energy.
The user can enter interactively the conditions of the simulation,
i.e. gas, pressure, temperature, gap length, voltage amplitude and frequency.
The output from this code includes current and voltage waveforms,
power deposition profiles, electron and ion densities and electric field distribution
between the electrodes.
Graphical displays including on-line movies of the main variables are available by
choosing from menus with options for hard copy output.
A very robust and efficient numerical algorithm is used and the run
times are short enough to make this tool ideal for tutorials or for detailed parametric
studies (run time is about 1 CPU second per cycle on a PC). A turbo technique can be
optionally used to accelerate convergence to steady state (harmonic steady state is
reached in a few minutes CPU on a PC).
SIGLO-RF comes with a data base including the electron and ion
transport coefficients in 15 gases. A user friendly Boltzmann
code is also provided with SIGLO-RF so that the user can calculate the electron
transport coefficients in a gas mixture (a set of electron-molecule cross sections is also
provided for the 15 gases).