Metal-Induced Crystallization of Amorphous Silicon and Silicon Germanium Films

The conditions,specialties and mechanism of amorphous Si and SiGe films crystallization induced by Ni and Al were analyzed systematically.Advantages of metal-induced crystallization over other crystallizing techniques and its application in thin film transistor fabrication were briefly introduced.And some influencing factors on crystallization velocity as well as the microstructure of the films,such as thermal process conditions and external electric field and etc,were recapitulated.Also,problems existing in electric field-aided metal-induced lateral crystallization were discussed.It was demonstrated that there exists a critical electric field strength,below which,the velocity of metal-induced lateral crystallization increases remarkably with the increase of field strength,while above which the velocity will decrease instead.This phenomenon can be interpreted fairly well in terms of electromigration effect.