Plasma-deposited thin-film step coverage calculated by computer simulation

Abstract

Interactions between radical growth precursors on plasma-deposited silicon thin-film surfaces Dependence of thinfilm microstructure on deposition rate by means of a computer simulationStep coverage in the vacuum deposition of thin metal films

High‐Efficiency Amorphous Silicon Solar Cell on a Periodic Nanocone Back Reflector

“…Careful inspection reveals that the vertical nanopillar morphology leads to pronounced deviations from conformality of the silicon layers: while the total silicon layer thickness on top of the pillar exceeds 250 nm, the thickness on the side walls of the pillar is only about 100 nm. These thickness variations can be explained by shadowing of the areas at the bottom of the nanopillars by the top of the nanopillars when an almost isotropic distribution of incidence angles of the silicon radicals from the plasma phase is assumed 50–54. Thickness variations in the intrinsic silicon layer are responsible for local variations in current generation, but more importantly, we must expect that the thin doped layers do not cover the structure sufficiently in areas of steepest slope, causing additional carrier recombination and collection problems, which are reflected in a lower FF .…”

Deposition of Barrier Layers for Thin Film Solar Cells Assisted by Bipolar Substrate Biasing

“…Ross and Vossen determined the minimum fractional coverage in the trenches as a dimensionless parameter in dependence on the inverse aspect ratio by simulation 7. The same investigations were done by experiment by Tsai et al8 They observed an increase in the minimum coverage with the inverse aspect ratio.…”

Mechanisms of layer growth in microwave-PECVD silan plasmas – Experiment and simulation

“…Thus, the layer growth of these coatings can be simulated with the already existing Monte-Carlo codes, which can be found in literature [10][11][12][13][14]. In such a deposition process, the chemical reaction of the layer-forming radicals with the target or the already grown coating is more or less insignificant, because of the (low) thermal energy of the film-forming radicals.…”

“…An extension to this approach is the distinction of the various film-forming particles. By an inclusion of their sticking probability, this problem necessitates a numerical solution, which was treated in several works in the 1970's and 1980's [10][11][12][13][14]. The used simulation algorithm is the Monte-Carlo method in all cases.…”