Vapor Growth of III Nitrides

Abstract

Good understanding of transport phenomena in vapor deposition systems is critical to fast and effective crystal growth system design. Transport phenomena are complicated and are related to operating conditions, such as temperature, velocity, pressure, and species concentration, and geometrical conditions, such as reactor geometry and source–substrate distance. Due to the limited in situ experimental monitoring, design and optimization of growth is mainly performed through semi-empirical and trial-and-error methods. Such an approach is only able to achieve improvement in the deposition sequence and cannot fulfill the increasingly stringent specifications required in industry. Numerical simulation has become a powerful alternative, as it is fast and easy to obtain critical information for the design and optimization of the growth system. The key challenge in vapor deposition modeling lies in developing an accurate simulation model of gas-phase and surface reactions, since very limited kinetic information is available in the literature. In this chapter, GaN thin-film growth by iodine vapor-phase epitaxy (IVPE) is used as an example to present important steps for system design and optimization by the numerical modeling approach. The advanced deposition model will be presented for multicomponent fluid flow, homogeneous gas-phase reaction inside the reactor, heterogeneous surface reaction on the substrate surface, heat transfer, and species transport. Thermodynamic and kinetic analysis will be presented for gas-phase and surface reactions, together with a proposal for the reaction mechanism based on experiments. The prediction of deposition rates is presented. Finally, the surface evolution of film growth from vapor is analyzed for the case in which surface diffusion determines crystal grain size and morphology. Key control parameters for film instability are identified for quality improvement.