Modeling of epitaxial silicon thin-film growth on a rotating substrate in a horizontal single-wafer reactor

The effect of substrate rotation on transport of reactive gases and epitaxial growth rate is investigated for a horizontal single-wafer reactor using a model and experiments. The governing equations for gas velocity, temperature, and chemical species transport are solved for the SiHCl3-H-2 system for Si thin film preparation. The rotating substrate causes a circulating gas flow region above itself in which an asymmetric and nonuniform SiHCl3 distribution is formed by thermal diffusion and species consumption due to the surface chemical reaction, even when the growth rate profile on the substrate surface is nearly uniform. The thickness of a thin-film grown at any position is obtained by an integral of the local growth rate along a concentric circle on the substrate surface. The good uniformity in the film thickness observed in calculation and measurement is mainly attributed to the averaging effect by integrating the local growth rate, and partially by the species concentration distribution change, both of which are caused by the rotating motion of the substrate.