Development of aerosol assisted chemical vapor deposition for thin film fabrication

Abstract

Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is widely used to grow a thin film applied in many industrial applications. This paper report the development of an aerosol assisted chemical vapor deposition (AACVD) which is one of the CVD methods. Newly developed AACVD system consists of a chamber of pyrex glass, two wire-heating elements placed to cover pyrex glass, a substrate holder, and an aerosol generator using an air brush sprayer. The temperature control system was developed to prevent condensation on the chamber walls. The control performances such as the overshoot and settling time were obtained from of the developed temperature controller. Wire-heating elements were controlled at certain setting value to heat the injected aerosol to form a thin film in the substrate. The performance of as-developed AACVD system tested to form a thin film where aerosol was sprayed into the chamber with a flow rate of 7 liters/minutes, and vary in temperatures and concentrations of precursor. The temperature control system have an overshoot around 25 °C from the desired set point temperature, very small temperature ripple 2 °C and a settling time of 20 minutes. As-developed AACVD successfully fabricated a ZnO thin film with thickness of below 1 µm. The performances of system on formation of thin films influenced by the generally controlled process such as values of setting temperature and concentration where the aerosol flow rate was fixed. Higher temperature was applied, the more uniform ZnO thin films were produced. In addition, temperature of the substrate also affected on surface roughness of the obtained films, while concentration of ZnO precursor determined the thickness of produce films. It is concluded that newly simple AACVD can be applied to produce a thin film.