Rapid Thermal Chemical Vapor Deposition of Polycrystalline Silicon-Germanium Films on SiO 2 and Their Properties

In this work, polycrystalline SiGe has been viewed as an alternative gate material to polysilicon in single wafer processing for the deep submicrometer VLSI applications. We studied deposition of the silicon-germanium (SiGe) films with different germanium concentrations (up to 85%) on SiO 2 in a rapid thermal chemical vapor deposition reactor using GeH 4 and SiH 4 /H 2 gas mixture with the temperature ranging from 550°C to 625°C. Since the SiGe RTCVD process is selective toward oxide and does not form nucleation sites on the oxide easily, an in-situ polysilicon flash technique is used to provide the necessary nucleation sites for the deposition of SiGe films with high germanium content. It was observed that with the in-situ polysilicon flash as a pre-nucleation seed, the SiGe deposited on SiO 2 forms a continuous polycrystalline layer. Polycrystalline SiGe films of about 2000A in thickness have a columnar grain structure with a grain size of approximately 1000A. Compositional analyses from Auger Electron Spectroscopy (AES) and Rutherford backscattering (RBS) show that the high germanium incorporation in the SiGe films has a weak dependence on the deposition temperature. It is also noted that the germanium content across the film thickness is fairly constant which is a critical factor for the application of SiGe films as the gate material. Lastly, we found that the surface morphology of SiGe films become smoother at lower deposition temperature.