Kinetics of solid phase crystallization of amorphous silicon analyzed by Raman spectroscopy

Solid phase crystallization (SPC) of amorphous silicon films grown by low pressure chemical vapor deposition was conducted using a tube furnace in nitrogen ambient at temperatures ranging from 560 degrees C to 1000 degrees C. The transformed crystalline fraction shows typical sigmoidal curves as a function of annealing time using Raman analysis adopted in this work. Arrhenius plot of the measured incubation time does not fit to the straight line since SPC kinetics has strong temperature dependence and since the heating rate is slow when using a conventional heating method. The grain size decreases as the annealing temperature increases. It, however, is not sensitive to the annealing temperature beyond 800 degrees C, since SPC kinetics is complete during the period of heating-up according to Raman spectroscopy. It was observed that doping of impurity atoms affect the crystallization kinetics. (C) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.