A New process for the Solid phase Crystallization of a-Si by the thin film heaters

Recently, according to the rapid progress in Flat-panel-display industry, there has been a growing interest in the poly-Si process. Compared with a-Si, poly-Si offers significantly high carrier mobility, so it has many advantages to high response rate in Thin Film Transistors (TFT's). We have investigated a new process for the high temperature Solid Phase Crystallization (SPC) of a-Si films without any damages on glass substrates using thin film heater. because the thin film heater annealing method is a very rapid thermal process, it has very low thermal budget compared to the conventional furnace annealing. therefore it has some characteristics such as selective area crystallization, high temperature annealing using glass substrates. A 500 $\AA$-thick a-Si film was crystallized by the heat transferred from the resistively heated thin film heaters through $SiO_2$ intermediate layer. a 1000 $\AA$-thick $TiSi_2$ thin film confined to have 15 $\textrm{mm}^{-1}$ length and various line width from 200 to 400 $\mu\textrm{m}$ was used as the thin film heater. By this method, we successfully crystallized 500 $\AA$-thick a-Si thin films at a high temperature estimated above $850^{\circ}C$ in a few seconds without any thermal deformation of g1ass substrates. These surprising results were due to the very small thermal budget of the thin film heaters and rapid thermal behavior such as fast heating and cooling. Moreover, we investigated the time dependency of the SPC of a-Si films by observing the crystallization phenomena at every 20 seconds during annealing process. We suggests the individual managements of nucleation and grain growth steps of poly-Si in SPC of a-Si with the precise control of annealing temperature. In conclusion, we show the SPC of a-Si by the thin film heaters and many advantages of the thin film heater annealing over other processes

박막히터를 사용한 비정질 실리콘의 고상결정화

유리 기판 위에 증착된 비정질 실리콘 박막의 고상 결정화에 대한 새로운 방법을 제시하였다. 비정질 실리콘 박막의 하부에 패턴 된 다양한 크기의 $TiSi_2$ 박막을 전기저항 가열 방식으로 가열함으로서 비정질 실리콘이 고상 결정화 되도록 하였다. 박막히터를 이용한 열처리는 매우 빠른 열처리 공정으로써, 일반적인 로에 의한 열처리에 비해 매우 낮은 thermal budget을 가지므로, 유리기판 위에서도 고온 열처리가 가능하다는 장점을 가진다. 본 연구에서는 500 $\AA$의 비정질 실리콘 박막을 약 $850^{\circ}C$ 이상의 높은 온도에서 수 초 내에 결정화 할 수 있음을 보였으며, 열처리 조건의 변화에 따른 영향과 지역선택성의 장점을 보였다.