A numerical/experimental investigation of microcontamination in a rotating disk chemical vapor deposition reactor

Abstract

Driven by a relentless decrease in feature size, the allowable particle contaminant size during semiconductor fabrication is now less than 100 nm. Particles in this size range (microcontaminants) in chemical vapor deposition (CVD) reactors are primarily gas-phase generated and are poorly understood. The purpose of the investigation described here is to enhance the understanding of the formation, transport and growth of microcontaminants in thermal CVD reactors. The approach being employed is to carry out a combined numerical/experimental study in which the particle dynamics are both modeled and optically probed in a rotating disk CVD reactor. The rotating disk configuration is utilized because of its simple and well-defined flow in which a particle layer forms in a highly accessible region of the reactor just above the substrate. Numerical/experimental comparisons of layer location and shape as a function of disk rotation rate are shown to be excellent if two empirically-determined parameters in the model...