Hydrodynamic description of epitaxial film growth in a horizontal reactor

Growth rate uniformity of epitaxial films is an important prerequisite for fabricating semiconductor devices. The correlation between the film thickness distributions and the vorticity distributions in the flow field is investigated in detail. Equations for conservation of mass, momentum and energy are solved numerically. The vorticity around the substrates and the vorticity gradient on the substrates are calculated from the velocity distribution rather than by solving the species equations. The substrate temperature is 1000 K, the total pressures are 2 and 20 Ton: and the Reynolds numbers are 1, 10 and 100. The thicknesses of the films deposited by low-pressure chemical vapor deposition are measured. As a result, it can be shown that the deposited film thickness distributions agree with the vorticity gradient distributions. This suggests that vorticity has an important influence on film deposition.