Epitaxial alignment of polycrystalline Si films on (100) Si

Abstract

We demonstrate that fine‐grained polycrystalline Si films obtained by chemical vapor deposition can be aligned expitaxially with respect to the underlying (100) Si substrate upon furnace annealing at temperatures of 1000–1150 °C. The alignment proceeds basically by the formation of epitaxial columns which subsequently grow laterally to consume the remaining polycrystalline Si. The rates of alignment are measured to be 20–200 Å/min in the temperature interval of annealing with an activation energy of 4.7 eV. The epitaxial layers so obtained are of reasonably good crystal quality and contains only a small amount of planar crystallographic defects.