Monitoring of crystallization and the effect of the deposition rate, hydrogen content and annealing process on the crystallization of hot wire chemical vapor deposited hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) films

Abstract The crystallization behavior of the a-Si:H films grown by hot wire chemical vapor deposition has been studied using X-ray diffraction (XRD) and reflectance spectroscopy. The surface morphology of the films does not change during annealing. It has been observed that the different deposition rates, hydrogen contents, or annealing processes do not affect the nucleation mechanism or orientation of the films differently. The full width at half maxima of the XRD (111) peak of high deposition rate (~ 100 A/s) films is observed to decrease when the same completely crystallized films (at 650 °C) are treated at increased temperatures up to 900 °C. Furthermore, films with different hydrogen contents and grown at a lower deposition rate (~ 5 A/s) showed similar crystal growth activation energies upon rapid thermal annealing.