300 W XeCl excimer laser annealing and sequential lateral solidification in low temperature poly silicon technology

Industrial production of low temperature p-Si back plates for LCDs by high power excimer laser annealing was introduced several years ago. Regarding the economy of the process, one of the major advantages of excimer laser annealing is the opportunity to make use of low cost glass substrates due to the low temperature of the annealing process. The Lambda Physik high power excimer laser series are operated with the MicroLas 370 mm line beam optics, integrated by Japan Steel Works into industrial systems. The MicroLas line beam optics for conventional excimer laser annealing (ELA) process converts the raw laser beam profile into a stable and homogeneous rectangular illumination field with high aspect ratio. The excimer laser light source, the LAMBDA STEEL 1000, delivers stabilized pulse energies up to 1 Joule at repetition rates up to 300Hz. The crystallization using excimer lasers allows to produce films with electron mobility of 100-150 cm2/Vsec with the Line beam technique. The new SLS-method, which is currently under industrial investigation, even allows to obtain electron mobility between 200-400 cm2/Vsec.