Uniformity study of amorphous and microcrystalline silicon thin films deposited on 10 cm × 10 cm glass substrate using hot wire CVD technique

The scaling up of the Hot Wire Chemical Vapor Deposition (HW‐CVD) technique to large deposition area can be done using a catalytic net of equal spaced parallel filaments. The large area deposition limit is defined as the limit whenever a further increment of the catalytic net area does not affect the properties of the deposited film. This is the case when a dense catalytic net is spread on a surface considerably larger than that of the film substrate. To study this limit, a system able to hold a net of twelve wires covering a surface of about 20 cm × 20 cm was used to deposit amorphous (a‐Si:H) and microcrystalline ( μ c‐Si:H) silicon over a substrate of 10 cm × 10 cm placed at a filament‐substrate distance ranging from 1 to 2 cm. The uniformity of the film thickness d and optical constants, n (x, λ ) and α (x, ħω ), was studied via transmission measurements. The thin film uniformity as a function of the filament‐substrate distance was studied. The experimental thickness profile was compared with the theoretical result obtained solving the diffusion equations. The optimization of the filament‐substrate distance allowed obtaining films with inhomogeneities lower than ±2.5% and deposition rates higher than 1 nm/s and 4.5 nm/s for ( μ c‐Si:H) and (a‐Si:H), respectively. (© 2010 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)