Thermal Activation of the Crystallization Kinetics of Amorphous Silicon

Abstract

ABSTRACTSolid Phase Crystallization of amorphous silicon films, deposited by the Low Pressure Chemical Vapor Deposition technique, is studied by in-situ monitoring the film conductance. The crystal growth rate VG, deduced from this measurement, was found to be thermally activated. The activation energy E behaviour for films with different doping varying in a great range, from undoped to 4×1019 cm−3, was then deduced. This behaviour, described for the first time in this work, shows a constant E for undoped and weak doping, then a high decrease after a doping value threshold. The undoped films show a decreasing E when the deposition rate increases i.e. when the structure of the amorphous deposited film tends to correspond to the relaxed amorphous network. All these new results are used to introduce a crystallization model based on a crystalline-amorphous double phase and on the charge of defects at the crystal-amorphous interface.