EI-5176 NANOTECHNOLOGY AND NANO ELECTRONICS

LASER CHEMICAL VAPOUR DEPOSITION

&
PLASMA ENHANCED CHEMICAL
VAPOUR DEPOSITION
Submitted by
M.PRADEEP
2025107
M.TECH INSTRUMENTATION
1ST YEAR SEM 2
 LASER CHEMICAL VAPOUR DEPOSITION

• LCVD is a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process for the localized deposition

of thin films.
• The LCVD system consists of a chamber with inlets for reagent gases. In LCVD,
the reagent gases are decomposed by the heat generated from a focused laser
beam to form metallic and ceramic depositions on a substrate.
• The laser heating is performed locally. As a result, patterning and direct writing
are achievable by moving
• The general form of chemical reactions in LCVD
is described as
G1+G2→S1+G3
where G1 and G2 are the reagent gases, S1 is the
solid deposition, and G3 is a gaseous by product.
• LCVD is classified into two types: photolytic and
pyrolytic.
• In pyrolytic LCVD the laser light impinges upon
the desired substrate, heating it locally over the
beam area.
• Owing to the incident thermal profile of the
beam, the surrounding reactant gas undergoes
thermal decomposition and deposition takes
place in a manner analogous to that in
conventional CVD or LPCVD
• By the laser irradiation , the local temperature on the substrate increases, and
when it reaches the threshold of the gas decomposition, a solid layer forms on
the substrate.
• Correct choice of laser can help avoid absorption in the reactant gases and aid
heat absorption at the substrate surface.
• The spatially selective heating allows deposition at high pressure of reactant
gases without gas-phase nucleation.
• It has been possible to deposit various materials, metals, semiconductors and
insulators by this thermochemical heterogeneous reaction.
• Typical lasers used for this process are continuous wave infrared lasers such as
CO2 and Nd-YAG
• The microscopic images of micro-springs made of carbon using pyrolytic
LCVD with ethylene precursor gas is shown.
• Pyrolytic LCVD has been used for the deposition of various metals, e.g. Al, Au,
Cu, Fe, Ni, Pt, Rh, Ti, W, ceramics.
• In photolytic LCVD technique the reactant gas molecules are photo-dissociated
owing to absorption of photons of appropriate wavelength of the laser light.
• The beam, either by single or multi-photon absorption, excites particular
vibrations of the reactant molecules and raise the internal energy to induce
dissociation.
• The reactive species produced by such a process of bond breaking interact with
substrate giving rise to the deposited film.
• Evidently, bond breaking is intrinsically efficient since energy is not randomly
distributed throughout the internal degree of freedom of the molecules.
• This technique has also been used in deposition of different materials in thin film
form.
•The deposition rate in CVD processes is dependent on the diffusion of
gases into and out of the process zone. In LCVD, the diffusion paths are
distributed in a three dimensional semi-spherical region above the
focused laser spot on the substrate rather than one dimensional diffusion
paths in CVD. As a result, the deposition rate of LCVD is higher than
that of CVD .
Advantages:
• photo-LCVD, seems to have some advantages over other CVD processes, like
additional flexibility and selectivity, low temperature operation, plus well-
defined, repeatable and controlled micro-region deposition capability.
• The pyro-LCVD, being due to a thermal effect, is suited to direct writing of
small features rather than large-area deposition.
• On the other hand, photo-LCVD has the potential to meet most of the
requirements of microelectronics.
• In general, LCVD give excellent step coverage and uniformity of deposition
because of the planar source of depositing species which is built-in in the
deposition mechanism
PLASMA CHEMICAL VAPOUR DEPOSITION
PLASMA:
• Plasma is one of fundamental states of matter, and was first described by chemist Irving
Langmuir in the 1920s. 
• Plasma can be artificially generated by heating a neutral gas or subjecting it to a
strong electromagnetic field to the point where an ionized gaseous substance becomes
increasingly electrically conductive.
• The resulting charged ions and electrons become influenced by long-range electromagnetic fields,
making the plasma dynamics more sensitive to these fields than a neutral gas.
• In contrast to chemical vapor deposition
PECVD uses a plasma rather than high
temperature as the source of activation
energy.
• That means the deposition can occur at much
lower temperatures since the plasma provides
the energy instead of using a thermal energy.
• This means that we don't need high
temperature furnaces and also we can use
substrates and samples that cannot tolerate
higher temperatures.
• This is a schematic over PECVD chamber.
• Inside the chamber, there's a flat place
for our substrate called the platen which
can be heated. Our substrate is placed on
the platen. At the top of the chamber,
there's an input for the gas.
• It forms the plasma that chemically
reacts on the substrate surface to deposit
the thin film.
• In addition to the source gas, there's a
high voltage radio frequency also called
RF electrical connection to an electrode
at the top of the chamber.
• This RF connection provides the power
needed to create the plasma
• PECVD uses energized atoms, this
plasma, to perform a chemical reaction
on the substrate surface that deposits a
thin film onto the substrate.
• Plasma is a fourth state of matter, we
use plasmas in our everyday lives. One
common use of plasma is in the
fluorescent light bulbs.
• In our PECVD system, we use a mixture
of gases to form the plasma that deposits
the film on to the substrate.
• first we pump the chamber down with a mechanical pump to approximately 1
millitorr to provide a clean environment for our deposition. Next, the source gas
or gasses flow into the chamber. The pressure in gas flow are allowed to stabilize
and the pressure can vary from the millitorr range up to a few torr. This
stabilization typically takes less than one minute
• Then, the high voltage is applied to the chamber electrode to ionize the
gas molecules.
• This ionization process makes the molecules of the source gas
chemically reactive.
• Then these molecules form a thin layer of material on our substrate
deposit different materials such as the silicon dioxide and silicon
nitride
• The growth rate of the film is constant. So the desired thickness to be achieve
by running the process for certain amount of time. To stop the thin film
deposition, we turn off the RF voltage and stop the gas flow.
• When the thin film deposition is complete, we pump the chamber down again
to remove all of the gases and by products of the deposition process.
• Then, we fill the chamber with nitrogen or we say the chamber is vented until
the pressure in the chamber is the same as the pressure in the room, which is
atmospheric pressure
• . Then, we can open the chamber and remove the sample. Our
last process is to clean the chamber after we're done with our
deposition, so that it's ready for the next user.
Parallel plate plasma reactor
Advantages:
• Comparing to other CVD process, on of the main advantages of PECVD is that
the process can be operate in low temperature while the deposition rate is
comparable to other CVD process. PECVD generally operates at a low
temperature in between 100˚C and 400˚C
• The system require less thermal energy
• The PECVD process can deposit a thin films with good dielectric properties.
This is important to integrated circuit fabrication because the transistor need a
good dielectric layer to maintain its characteristic and performance
• Good conformal step coverage and excellent uniformity also provided by the
PECVD process
Disadvantages:
• The plasma system ionized the gases and drive it to certain direction to deposit
the material. The plasma gases will collide with the surface and the plasma could
damage the films. Therefore, the devices may deteriorate during the process.
• The hydrogen inside the plasma gas can react with silicon or nitrogen to form Si-
H and SiNH. This can affect many properties of the devices including UV
absorption, stability, mechanical stress, electrical conductivity, etc.
Thank you