Growth law of silicon oxides by dry oxidation

Abstract

A theoretical description of the kinetic mechanism of thermal oxidation in silicon is proposed by complementing the Deal - Grove model. The relationship of the classical linear - parabolic growth law is generalized to the logarithmic growth law which provides a complete description for the whole regime of oxide films. In particular, the enhanced oxidation rate in the thin regime may be attributed to the diffusion length, which is characterized by the difference between the activation energies of the diffusion process and the reaction process. Our fitting of the logarithmic growth law to several experimental results shows excellent agreement and the fitting parameters also provide activation energies of 1.50 and 2.49 eV for the interfacial reaction and diffusion in oxide respectively.