Development of a spatially controllable chemical vapor deposition reactor with combinatorial processing capabilities

Most conventional chemical vapor deposition (CVD) systems do not have the spatial actuation and sensing capabilities necessary to control deposition uniformity or to intentionally induce nonuniform deposition patterns for single-wafer combinatorial CVD experiments. In an effort to address these limitations, a novel CVD reactor system has been developed that can explicitly control the spatial profile of gas-phase chemical composition across the wafer surface. This paper discusses the construction of a prototype reactor system featuring a three-zone, segmented showerhead design. Experiments are performed to assess the ability of this reactor system to deposit tungsten films by the hydrogen reduction process; segment-to-segment process recipes are controlled to deposit spatially nonuniform W films. The capabilities of this reactor system for materials discovery research are discussed. (c) 2005 American Institute of Physics.