Enhancement of heat transfer in Czochralski growth of silicon crystals with a chemical cooling technique

Abstract

The cost of producing single-crystalline silicon with the Czochralski method can be reduced by promoting the crystal size and/or crystal pulling rate. However, more latent heat of solidification needs to be released from the melt-crystal (m-c) interface during the crystal growth process. In this study, the C-CO2 chemical endothermic reaction is proposed as a novel and efficient cooling technique to solve this problem. Compared with the conventional gas cooling method, C-CO2 endothermic reaction method can significantly enhance the heat transfer in the crystal at the m-c interface. It was found that the heat transfer is more enhanced with a chemical reaction of smaller activation energy, and the m-c interface becomes flatter. The influence of the carbon concentration in the chemical reactive gas flow on the heat removal in the crystal at the m-c interface is also investigated. The cooling effect is significantly increased with the increase in the carbon concentration when it is small. However, when the carbon concentration in the reactive gas is high, the cooling effect just increases slightly. The research demonstrates that the proposed chemical endothermic reaction is a promising cooling technique to be applied in CZ-Si crystal growth with large size/high pulling rate.