Correlation of Stress With Photo-Degradation in Hydrogenated Amorphous Silicon Prepared by Hot-Wire CVD

Abstract

ABSTRACTAn innovative bending-beam method is used to study the stress of thin film a-Si:H deposited on thin quartz by hot-wire chemical vapor deposition (CVD) techniques. When the deposition temperature increases from 280 to 440 °C the hydrogen content decreases from 8 to <1 at.%, and the initial compressive stress also decreases from 420 to 74 MPa. We found that there is a 10−4 photo-induced increase of the initial compressive stress under 300 mW/cm2 light-soaking, which can be recovered to the initial value by thermal annealing at 160 °C for 1 h. The results imply that the Si-H bonds contribute to the compressive stress in the a-Si:H film. There is no simple correlation between the stress and the photodegradation of the electronic properties.