• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2014.02a
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• pp.150.1-150.1
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• 2014

Showerhead is used as a main part in the semiconductor equipment. The face plate flatness should remain constant and the cleaning performance must be gained to keep the uniformity level of etching or deposition in chemical vapor deposition process. High operating temperature or long period of thermal loading could lead the showerhead to be deformed thermally. In some case, the thermal deformation appears very sensitive to showerhead performance. This paper describes the methods for robust design using computational fluid dynamics. To reveal the influence of the post distribution on flow pattern in the showerhead cavity, numerical simulation was performed for several post distributions. The flow structure appears similar to an impinging flow near a centered baffle in showerhead cavity. We took the structure as an index to estimate diffusion path. A robust design to reduce the thermal deformation of showerhead can be achieved using post number increase without ill effect on flow. To prevent the showerhead deformation by heat loading, its face plate thickness was determined additionally using numerical simulation. The face plate has thousands of impinging holes. The design key is to keep pressure drop distribution on the showerhead face plate with the holes. This study reads the methodology to apply to a showerhead hole design. A Hagen-Poiseuille equation gives the pressure drop in a fluid flowing through such hole. The assumptions of the equation are the fluid is viscous-incompressible and the flow is laminar fully developed in a through hole. An equation can be expressed with radius R and length L related to the volume flow rate Q from the Hagen-Poiseuille equation, $Q={\pi}R4{\Delta}p/8{\mu}L$, where ${\mu}$ is the viscosity and ${\Delta}p$ is the pressure drop. In present case, each hole has steps at both the inlet and the outlet, and the fluid appears compressible. So we simplify the equation as $Q=C(R,L){\Delta}p$. A series of performance curves for a through hole with geometric parameters were obtained using two-dimensional numerical simulation. We obtained a relation between the hole diameter and hole length from the test cases to determine hole diameter at fixed hole length. A numerical simulation has been performed as a tool for enhancing showerhead robust design from flow structure. Geometric parameters for the design were post distribution and face plate thickness. The reinforced showerhead has been installed and its effective deposition profile is being shown in factory.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2004.04a
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• pp.1475-1480
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• 2004

Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition (PECVD) process uses unique property of plasma to modify surfaces and to achieve the high deposition rates. In this study, a vertical thermal RF-PECVD (Radio Frequency-PECVD) reactor is modeled to investigate thermal flow and the deposition rates with various shapes of the showerhead. The showerhead in the CVD reactor has the shape of a ring and gases are injected in parallel with the susceptor, which is a rotating disk. In order to achieve the high deposition rates, we have simulated the thermal flow fields in the reactor with several showerhead models. Especially the effects of the number of injection holes and the rotating speed of the susceptor are studied. Using a commercial code, CFDACE, which uses FVM (Finite Volume Method) and SIMPLE algorithm, governing equations have been solved for the pressure, mass-flow rates and temperature distributions in the CVD reactor. With the help of the Nusselt number and Sherwood number, the heat and mass transfers on the susceptor are investigated. In order to characteristics of measure the flatness of the layer, furthermore, the relative growth rate (RGR) is considered.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2011.06a
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• pp.459-460
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• 2011

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.16-21
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• 2020

How accurately reproducible energy is delivered to the wafer in the process of making thin films using PE-CVD (Plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition) during the semiconductor process. This is the most important technique, and most of the reaction on the wafer surface is made by thermal energy. In this study, we studied the method of monitoring the change of thermal energy transferred to the wafer surface by monitoring the temperature change according to the change of the thin film formed on the showerhead facing the wafer. Through this research, we could confirm the monitoring of wafer thin-film which is changed due to abnormal operation and accumulation of equipment, and we can expect improvement of semiconductor quality and yield through process reproducibility and equipment status by real-time monitoring of problem of deposition process equipment performance.

• Korean Journal of Materials Research
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.144-148
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• 1999

We have studied the deposition characteristics of thick silicon dioxide film on Si substrate by $O_3$/TEOS APCVD(Atmospheric Pressure Chemical Vapor Deposition). The effect of deposition parameters such as the distance between showerhead and substrate, deposition temperature, TEOS flow rate and $O_3$/TEOS ratio on deposition rate, surface morphology, and properties of films as investigated. As deposition temperature increased, deposition rate decreased but the surface morphology and adhesion of film to substrate improved. As the distance between showerhead and substrate decreased, the deposition rate increased. Etching rate using the BOE increased as TEOS flow rate increased, but was independent of$ O_3$/TEOS ratio. Deposition rate of $5\mu\textrm{m}$/hour was obtained under the condition that the distance between showerhead and substrate was 5mm and the deposition temperature was $370^{\circ}C$.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.33 no.5
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• pp.344-349
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• 2020

Modern thin film deposition processes require high deposition rates, low costs, and high-quality films. Atmospheric pressure plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (AP-PECVD) meets these requirements. AP-PECVD causes little damage on thin film deposition surfaces compared to conventional PECVD. Moreover, a higher deposition rate is expected due to the surface heating effect of atomic hydrogens in AP-PECVD. In this study, polycrystalline silicon thin film was deposited at a low temperature of 100℃ and then AP-PECVD experiments were performed with various plasma powers and hydrogen gas flow rates. A deposition rate of 15.2 nm/s was obtained at the VHF power of 400 W. In addition, a metal foam showerhead was employed for uniform gas supply, which provided a significant improvement in the thickness uniformity.

• 한국정보디스플레이학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2006.08a
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• pp.1676-1681
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• 2006

We report on Organic Vapor Phase Deposition $(OVPD^{(R)})$ an innovative deposition technology for organic light emitting device (OLED) and organic semiconductor manufacturing. The combination of $OVPD^{(R)}$ with Close Coupled Showerhead (CCS) technology results in manufacturing equipment with vast potential for cost effective manufacturing of OLED displays commercially competitive to LCD. The actual $OVPD^{(R)}$ equipment concept and design is discussed: Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) modeling is compared with experimental results proving the excellent controllability of the deposition process. Further other production relevant deposition properties are being reviewed e.g. high deposition rates and high organic material utilization efficiency of the $OVPD^{(R)}$ - Technology. Data from devices made by $OVPD^{(R)}$ show comparable/ superior performance to those fabricated with conventional vacuum thermal evaporation (VTE) techniques. An outlook on further potentials of $OVPD^{(R)}$ with respect to enabling advanced organic device structures is given.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2014.02a
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• pp.221-221
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• 2014

The present work proposes an improved numerical simulator for design and modification of large area capacitively coupled plasma (CCP) processing chamber. CCP, as notoriously well-known, demands the tremendously huge computational cost for carrying out transient analyses in realistic multi-dimensional models, because electron dissociations take place in a much smaller time scale (${\Delta}t{\approx}10-8{\sim}10-10$) than time scale of those happened between neutrals (${\Delta}t{\approx}10-1{\sim}10-3$), due to the rf drive frequencies of external electric field. And also, for spatial discretization of electron flux (Je), exponential scheme such as Scharfetter-Gummel method needs to be used in order to alleviate the numerical stiffness and resolve exponential change of spatial distribution of electron temperature (Te) and electron number density (Ne) in the vicinity of electrodes. Due to such computational intractability, it is prohibited to simulate CCP deposition in a three-dimension within acceptable calculation runtimes (<24 h). Under the situation where process conditions require thickness non-uniformity below 5%, however, detailed flow features of reactive gases induced from three-dimensional geometric effects such as gas distribution through the perforated plates (showerhead) should be considered. Without considering plasma chemistry, we therefore simulated flow, temperature and species fields in three-dimensional geometry first, and then, based on that data, boundary conditions of two-dimensional plasma discharge model are set. In the particular case of SiH4-NH3-N2-He CCP discharge to produce deposition of SiNxHy thin film, a cylindrical showerhead electrode reactor was studied by numerical modeling of mass, momentum and energy transports for charged particles in an axi-symmetric geometry. By solving transport equations of electron and radicals simultaneously, we observed that the way how source gases are consumed in the non-isothermal flow field and such consequences on active species production were outlined as playing the leading parts in the processes. As an example of application of the model for the prediction of the deposited thickness uniformity in a 300 mm wafer plasma processing chamber, the results were compared with the experimentally measured deposition profiles along the radius of the wafer varying inter-electrode gap. The simulation results were in good agreement with experimental data.

• Applied Science and Convergence Technology
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.139-142
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• 2017

In this paper, InP-based InGaAs/InAlAs quantum cascade lasers(QCLs) providing nearly zero emission wavelength mismatch between the measured emission wavelength and the designed transition wavelength of QCLs is presented. The zero emission wavelength mismatch of QCLs influenced by both the accurate compositions and thicknesses of the low-pressure metal-organic vapor-phase epitaxy(MOVPE) grown InGaAs and InAlAs layers throughout the core and the abrupt composition transitions between InGaAs and InAlAs layers. The abrupt interfaces between InGaAs and InAlAs layers have been achieved throughout the core structure by means of controlling individually purged vent/run valves of a closed coupled showerhead reactor. In addition, maintaining substrate temperature constant during InGaAs/InAlAs core growth was a partial factor of uniformity improvement of QCLs. These approaches for reducing the possible discrepancies between the designed and MOVPE grown epitaxial structures could lead to improvement of QCL performance.

• Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Materials
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.156-159
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• 2011

SiNx:H films have been widely used for anti-reflection coatings and passivation for crystalline silicon solar cells. In this study, SiNx:H films were deposited using high frequency (13.56 MHz) direct plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition, and the optical and passivation properties were investigated. The radio frequency power, the spacing between the showerhead and wafer, the $NH_3/SiH_4$ ratio, the total gas flow, and the $N_2$ gas flow were changed over certain ranges for the film deposition. The thickness uniformity, the refractive index, and the minority carrier lifetime were then measured in order to study the properties of the film. The optimal deposition conditions for application to crystalline Si solar cells are determined from the results of this study.