Recent progress of crystal growth modeling and growth control

With the rapid growth of electronic and optoelectronic industry, the demand for crystal materials increased dramatically for the past two decades. The requirement for better, cheaper, and larger single crystals has driven extensive research and development in crystal growth. To understand the interplay of associated transport processes and phase transformation, as well as to provide a design basis, crystal growth modeling is becoming more important in both fundamentals and practice. In this article, we review some recent progress of numerical modeling in crystal growth through three Subjects: (I) hot-zone design, (2) active growth control, and (3) morphological simulation. Examples are given through our research results in recent years. For better illustration and process understanding some visualization results using transparent materials are given. The needs and the challenges ahead for crystal growth modeling are also discussed. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.