72 Thin film growth
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by the ballistic deposition of growth species. This phenomenon is analogous
to the situation where sunlight to short plants is shut off by tall plants, which
is known as the ‘shadowing effect’ (Bales et al., 1990). In shadowing growth,
a lm has less ux of the reactant at the bottom of the protrusion obscured
by the neighboring protrusions. Researchers in CVD have used the idea
of ballistic transport to study trench or via lling problems (Ikegawa and
Kobayashi, 1989; Cooke and Harris, 1989; Watanabe and Komiyama, 1990;
Cale and Raupp, 1990). This line-of-sight model can explain very well not
only the features observed in trench evolution but also roughness evolution,
although the details of the model may vary. Currently, unique structures
can be fabricated by utilizing the shadowing effect such as glancing angle
deposition (Robbie et al., 1996; Robbie and Brett, 1997).
Roughness evolution during CVD by shadowing has been studied
experimentally (Roland and Guo, 1991; Tanenbaum et al., 1997; Kondo et al.,
1998; Flewitt et al., 1999) and theoretically (Bales et al., 1990; Roland and
Guo, 1991; Yao and Guo, 1993; Singh and Shaqfeh, 1993; Zhao et al., 2001;
Drotar et al., 2001). In shadowing growth, x
p
grows power laws in time,
x
p
~ t
d
g
, where g is a scaling exponent. Both experimental and theoretical
works focused on the scaling property of the width of the roughness, w ~
t
d
b
, where b is called the growth exponent. If the shadowing effect only
were present, one would expect b = 1 (Roland and Guo, 1991; Yao and
Guo, 1993). b decreases as h becomes small or a stabilizing factor such as
surface diffusion becomes dominant (Singh and Shaqfeh, 1993; Zhao et al.,
2001). In a-Si deposition of low pressure CVD, g increases from 0.08 to
0.55 as temperature decreases (Zhao et al., 2001). This is because, at higher
temperatures, surface diffusion as a stabilizing factor becomes dominant and
the sticking probability decreases. Shadowing is typical at h in the order of
0.1. When h is less than 0.01, shadowing becomes negligible, which is the
same as the fact that precursors with small h can fulll deep trenches, while
when t
d
increases, roughness becomes visible even at h of less than 0.01.
Increasing the temperature to enhance surface diffusion and the capillary
effect is one route to limiting roughness evolution by shadowing. However,
high temperatures sometimes lead to an increase in the sticking probability
of precursors. Therefore, the choice of precursor is important in reducing
the size of roughness caused by shadowing.
Concentration gradient
When the size of the protrusion becomes larger than the mean free path of
the reactants, i.e., Kn = l/x
p
< 1, the growth of the protrusion cannot be
explained by ballistic deposition and is accelerated by the concentration
gradients of growth species near the protrusion in the gas phase. in this
regime, roughness can expand even at small h. Due to the concentration
ThinFilm-Zexian-04.indd 72 7/1/11 9:40:21 AM