Semiconductor industry reactor types

Plasmas can be used in CVD reactors to activate and partially decompose the precursor species and perhaps form new chemical species. This allows deposition at a temperature lower than thermal CVD. The process is called plasma-enhanced CVD (PECVD) (12). The plasmas are generated by direct-current, radio-frequency (r-f), or electron-cyclotron-resonance (ECR) techniques. Eigure 15 shows a parallel-plate CVD reactor that uses r-f power to generate the plasma. This type of PECVD reactor is in common use in the semiconductor industry to deposit siUcon nitride, Si N and glass (PSG) encapsulating layers a few micrometers-thick at deposition rates of 5—100 nm /min. 

There are two general types of CVD reactors, one is the chamber type and the other is the tube type. The tube type reactor is typically a hot wall reactor and has been used in the semiconductor industry for the deposition of simple binary thin films such as SijN. This type of deposition reactor usually has quite large throughput because a few hundred wafers can be loaded and processed. However, the CVD precursors should have large diffusivities in the gas phase and be stable over the homogeneous reactions to produce uniform deposition on a large number of wafers. For tube type reactors, as for all hot wall type reactors, the CVD reaction occurs on the wall of the reactor as well as on the wafers. This increases the consumption of the precursors. Therefore, CVD reactors for BST thin films are the other type, except for a very recent report from Toshiba of Japan. They reported CVD of BST thin films utilizing a tube type reactor which had a rotatory wafer holder to improve the uniformity of deposited films. Details of the CVD reactor have not been reported yet, thus, in this section only the details of chamber type reactors are discussed. 

This section provides brief descriptions of industrial processes in which noncatalytic gas-solid reactions play a major role. Although by no means complete, the discussion includes both traditional processes, such as the blast furnace for the production of iron from ore and the regeneration of fluidized-bed catalytic cracking catalyst, and newer processes such as the dry capture of SO2 from flue gas and the production of silicon for semiconductor applications. Each of the three primary reactor types is represented in the processes described. 

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