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Careful interface design and engineering are “keys” to effectively implement a conformal 10 nm plasma-assisted atomic-layer-deposited NiO film as hole transport layer in a p–i–n perovskite solar cell architecture.

Area-selective atomic layer deposition (ALD) of ZnO was achieved on SiO 2 seed layer patterns on Hterminated silicon substrates, using diethylzinc (DEZ) as the zinc precursor and H 2 O as the coreactant. The selectivity of the ALD process was studied using in situ spectroscopic ellipsometry and scanning electron microscopy, revealing improved selectivity for increasing deposition temperatures from 100 to 300 °C. The selectivity was also investigated using transmission electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations were performed to corroborate the experimental results obtained and to provide an atomic-level understanding of the underlying surface chemistry. A kinetically hindered proton transfer reaction from the H-terminated Si was conceived to underpin the selectivity exhibited by the ALD process. By combining the experimental and DFT results, we suggest that the trend in selectivity with temperature may be due to a strong DEZ or H 2 O physisorption on the H-terminated Si that hampers high selectivity at low deposition temperature. This work highlights the deposition temperature as an extra process parameter to improve the selectivity.

Within the method of atomic layer deposition (ALD), additional reactivity can be delivered to the surface in the form of plasmaproduced species. The application of such a low-temperature plasma in the ALD cycle can therefore open up a processing parameter space that is unattainable by the strictly thermally driven process. In this contribution several possible benefits of plasmaassisted ALD will be reviewed showing bright prospect for plasma-assisted ALD for a large variety of applications, also far beyond the typical use in semiconductor devices. Atomic layer deposition for processing at the nanoscaleWithin the current trends of downscaling in the semiconductor industry and the boost in nanoscience and nanotechnology, atomic layer deposition (ALD) is the method of choice for depositing high quality films with ultimate growth control and with excellent step coverage on very demanding topologies [1, 2 , 3 ]. The virtue of this approach is that deposition is controlled at the atomic level by self-limiting surface reactions by alternate exposure of the substrate surface to different gas-phase precursors (see Fig. 1). Each surface reaction occurs between a gas phase reactant (precursor) and a surface functional group creating a volatile product molecule that desorbs from the surface, and a new surface functional group that is not reactive with the precursor. After pumping away the first precursor, a second precursor is introduced, which deposits a second element through reaction with the new surface functional group and then restores the initial surface functional group. This set of reactions form one ALD-cycle resulting basically in one (sub)monolayer of film growth per cycle. The ALD-cycle can be repeated until the desired film thickness is reached. Furthermore, unlike chemical vapor deposition (CVD), the deposition rate is not proportional to the flux on the surface. Therefore, the same amount of material is deposited everywhere on the surface even in high aspect ratio structures when there is sufficient flux. Other benefits of ALD are the good uniformity that can be achieved on large substrates, the relatively low substrate temperatures used in the process (temperature window typically 200-400 °C), and the fact that ALD can readily produce multilayer structures.