UV-pretreatment- and near-infrared rapid thermal annealing-enhanced dehydrogenation for a-Si:H thin films at 400 °C

Publication date: Available online 11 December 2015
Source:Thin Solid Films
Author(s): Sanghyun Ji, Chi-Sun Hwang, Pilseong Jeong, Sungyong Lee, Kwang Soon Lee
A new dehydrogenation processing method was developed for the low-temperature polysilicon process. This method can reduce both the process temperature and time through the combination of an ultraviolet pretreatment (UVP) process with near-infrared rapid thermal annealing (NIR-RTA). NIR-RTA using tungsten-halogen lamps was observed to reduce the dehydrogenation time by approximately two thirds and the temperature by approximately 20 °C compared to conventional furnace processing. The UVP process was able to lower the dehydrogenation temperature by a further 20 °C. Thus, the new dehydrogenation process, consisting of UVP followed by NIR-RTA, could achieve a hydrogen concentration of 1.97 at.% in 20 min at 360 °C.