Advanced deposition model for thermal activated chemical vapor deposition

Thermal Activated Chemical Vapor Deposition (TACVD) is defined as the formation of a stable solid product on a heated substrate surface from chemical reactions and/or dissociation of gaseous reactants in an activated environment. It has become an essential process for producing solid film, bulk material, coating, fibers, powders and monolithic components. Global market of CVD products has reached multi billions dollars for each year.; In the recent years CVD process has been extensively used to manufacture semiconductors and other electronic components such as polysilicon, AlN and GaN. Extensive research effort has been directed to improve deposition quality and throughput. To obtain fast and high quality deposition, operational conditions such as temperature, pressure, fluid velocity and species concentration and geometry conditions such as source-substrate distance need to be well controlled in a CVD system.; This thesis will focus on design of CVD processes through understanding the transport and reaction phenomena in the growth reactor. Since the in situ monitor is almost impossible for CVD reactor, many industrial resources have been expended to determine the optimum design by semi-empirical methods and trial-and-error procedures. This approach has allowed the achievement of improvements in the deposition sequence, but begins to show its limitations, as this method cannot always fulfill the more and more stringent specifications of the industry. To resolve this problem, numerical simulation is widely used in studying the growth techniques.; The difficulty of numerical simulation of TACVD crystal growth process lies in the simulation of gas phase and surface reactions, especially the latter one, due to the fact that very limited kinetic information is available in the open literature. In this thesis, an advanced deposition model was developed to study the multi-component fluid flow, homogeneous gas phase reactions inside the reactor chamber, heterogeneous surface reactions on the substrate surface, conductive, convective, inductive and radiative heat transfer, species transport and thereto-elastic stress distributions. Gas phase and surface reactions are studied thermodynamically and kinetically. Based on experimental results, detailed reaction mechanisms are proposed and the deposition rates are predicted. The deposition model proposed could be used for other experiments with similar operating conditions.; Four different growth systems are presented in this thesis to discuss comprehensive transport phenomena in crystal growth from vapor. The first is the polysilicon bulk growth by modified Siemens technique in which a silicon tube is used as the starting material. The research effort has been focused on system design, geometric and operating parameters optimization, and heterogeneous and homogeneous silane pyrolysis analysis. The second is the GaN thin film growth by iodine vapor phase epitaxy technique. Heat and mass transport is studied analytically and numerically. Gas phase and surface reactions are analyzed thermodynamically and kinetically. Quasi-equilibrium and kinetic deposition models are developed to predict the growth rate. The third one is the AlN thin film growth by halide vapor phase epitaxy technique. The effects of gas phase and surface reactions on the crystal growth rate and deposition uniformity are studied. The last one is the AlN sublimation growth system. The research effort has been focused on the effect of thermal environment evolution on the crystal growth process. The thermoelastic stress formed in the as-grown AlN crystal is also calculated.