Abstract
Chemical vapour deposition (CVD) is a powerful technology for producing high-quality solid thin films and coatings. Although widely used in modern industries, it is continuously being developed as it is adapted to new materials. Today, CVD synthesis is being pushed to new heights with the precise manufacturing of both inorganic thin films of 2D materials and high-purity polymeric thin films that can be conformally deposited on various substrates. In this Primer, an overview of the CVD technique, including instrument construction, process control, material characterization and reproducibility issues, is provided. By taking graphene, 2D transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) and polymeric thin films as typical examples, the best practices for experimentation involving substrate pretreatment, high-temperature growth and post-growth processes are presented. Recent advances and scaling-up challenges are also highlighted. By analysing current limitations and optimizations, we also provide insight into possible future directions for the method, including reactor design for high-throughput and low-temperature growth of thin films. This Primer on chemical vapour deposition summarizes current and emerging experimental set-ups as well as common characterization approaches used to determine thin film formation and quality as applied to graphene and other novel 2D materials.
Highlights
Chemical vapour deposition (CVD) is a widely used materials processing technology in which thin films are formed on a heated substrate via a chemical reaction of gas-phase precursors
CVD allows the tuning of the structures and properties of the resulting products[9,10], and various advanced CVD systems and their variants have been developed, such as plasma-enhanced CVD2 and metal– organic CVD (MOCVD)[4] (Box 1)
We demonstrate the flexibility of this method by discussing important applications of CVD, including growth of binary and ternary 2D materials and polymeric thin films
Summary
We introduce the materials preparation process using graphene as an example (Fig. 3). For non-metallic substrates (for example, SiO2 or Al2O3), if the precursor concentration and temperature are both sufficiently high the thermally decomposed active carbon species can deposit onto the substrate and form a graphene film[30,40,41,52] (Fig. 3f), where gas-phase decomposition reactions play a crucial role. In this case, employing high-energy plasma can promote the decomposition of the carbon precursor and lower the growth temperature (
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