Rapid Thermal Processing

Rapid Thermal Processing (RTP) is a well established single-wafer technology in USLI semiconductor manufacturing and electrical engineering, as well as in materials science. The biggest advantage of RTP is that it eliminates the long-ramp-up and ramp-down times associated with furnaces, enabling a significant reduction in the thermal budget. Today, RTP is in production use for source/drain implant annealing, contact alloying, formation of refractory nitrides and silicides and thin gate dielectric (oxide) formation. The aim of Symposium I was to provide an overview of the latest information on research and development in the different topics cited above. The potential applications of RTP in new areas like large area devices such as flat planel displays and solar cells has to be investigated. About 30 papers were presented in this symposium. The contributions of most interest involved modelling and control, junctions formation and thermal oxidation, deposition and recrystallisation and silicide formations. However, the range of topics and the intent to focus on underlying, fundamental issues like dopant diffusion in silicon from solid sources, strain relaxation and photonic effects, nucleation as well as applications to magnetic films and solar cells devices.