Abstract
A model is presented which reasons that the thermal oxidation of silicon is surface reaction limited, and that the reaction rate is controlled by the viscous flow of newly forming oxide to accommodate the volume expansion that occurs when silicon oxidizes. The SiO2 must form at silicon lattice sites and therefore epitaxially. This thermody-namically unstable epitaxial structure reconfigures and this reconfiguration results in an increase of the average viscosity of the oxide. The continual increase of average oxide viscosity accounts for the continual decrease in oxidation rate with time. A mathemat-ical analysis based on this model is used to derive the simple power law x = atb relating oxide thickness, x, to oxidation time, t which has been shown previously to model phe-nomenologically all of the extant dry oxidation data.1 The physical significances of the coefficient a and exponent b are obtained by the interpretation of the x vs t data in the literature in terms of this mathematical analysis.
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Nicollian, E.H., Reisman, A. A new model for the thermal oxidation kinetics of silicon. J. Electron. Mater. 17, 263–272 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02652105
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02652105