Advances in remote plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition for low temperature In situ hydrogen plasma clean and Si and Si_1-xGe_x epitaxy

Abstract

Remote plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (RPCVD) is a low temperature growth technique which has been successfully employed inin situ remote hydrogen plasma clean of Si(100) surfaces, silicon homoepitaxy and Si_{1- x}Ge_x heteroepitaxy in the temperature range of 150–450° C. The epitaxial process employs anex situ wet chemical clean, anin situ remote hydrogen plasma clean, followed by a remote argon plasma dissociation of silane and germane to generate the precursors for epitaxial growth. Boron doping concentrations as high as 10²¹ cm⁻³ have been achieved in the low temperature epitaxial films by introducing B₂H₆/He during the growth. The growth rate of epitaxial Si can be varied from 0.4Å/min to 50Å/min by controlling therf power. The wide range of controllable growth rates makes RPCVD an excellent tool for applications ranging from superlattice structures to more conventional Si epitaxy. Auger electron spectroscopy analysis has been employed to confirm the efficacy of this remote hydrogen plasma clean in terms of removing surface contaminants. Reflection high energy electron diffraction and transmission electron microscopy have been utilized to investigate the surface structure in terms of crystallinity and defect generation. Epitaxial Si and Si_1-xGe_x films have been grown by RPCVD with defect densities below the detection limits of TEM (~10⁵ cm^-2 or less). The RPCVD process also exploits the hydrogen passivation effect at temperatures below 500° C to minimize the adsorption of C and 0 during growth. Epitaxial Si and Si_1-xGe_x films with low oxygen content (~3 × 10₁₈ cm^-3) have been achieved by RPCVD. Silicon and Si/Si_1-xGe_x mesa diodes with boron concentrations ranging from 10¹⁷ to 10¹⁹ cm^-3 in the epitaxial films grown by RPCVD show reasonably good current-voltage characteristics with ideality factors of 1.2-1.3. A Si/Si_1-xGe_x superlattice structure with sharp Ge transitions has been demonstrated by exploiting the low temperature capability of RPCVD.In situ plasma diagnostics using single and double Langmuir probes has been performed to reveal the nature of the RPCVD process.