Highly uniform polycrystalline silicon thin films fabricated by metal plate energy-assisted agent method

In this paper, we proposed a novel technique to crystallize amorphous silicon films. A crystallized silicon film shows smooth surface and good crystallinity. Crystallization was conducted by a mechanism utilizing an energy-assisted agent. In this technique, an amorphous silicon film was in conjunction with a metal plate as a sample. Then, this sample was subjected to a rapid thermal annealing process. A uniform and high-quality polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) can be obtained through an efficient energy transfer between the metal plate and the semiconductor thin film. As a result, the average size of grains obtained was 0.4 mu m and the surface roughness was only about 0.34nm. The result of X-ray diffraction analysis shows a preferential crystal orientation of (111). On the other hand, we conducted an in-depth electron spectroscopy for chemical analysis and secondary ion mass spectrometry measurement on the crystallized film. It was proved that the content of metal atoms within the crystallized film can be neglected.