Effects of annealing temperature on crystallisation kinetics and properties of polycrystalline Si thin films and solar cells on glass fabricated by plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition

Kinetics of the laser-induced solid phase crystallization of amorphous silicon—Time-resolved Raman spectroscopy and computer simulations

“…(1) and (2), were estimated from the nucleation and growth rates at reference temperature 600°C, which were 600°C =4.2 µm -3 min -1 and 600°C = 0.7 nm s -1 . These parameters correspond to crystallization period 5 hours at temperature 600°C reported in several studies [6,[18][19][20]. Since higher nucleation rate results in finer crystallites, the nucleation rate used in this model was adjusted to obtain crystallite size approximately 50nm, as indicated by the broadening of our Raman spectra or as estimated from the XRD correlation length in the literature [21].…”

Crystallization of amorphous silicon films by photon-involved rapid thermal annealing

“…One alternative strategy to improve stability is to crystallize amorphous silicon materials to make poly-crystalline silicon film solar cells [11][12][13]. Several approaches, such as conventional thermal annealing (CTA) under high temperature [14,15], rapid thermal annealing (RTA) [16][17][18], metal induced crystallization [19][20][21], and laser annealing [22][23][24][25], were reported previously as being able to realize the crystallization of amorphous silicon films. Since the Si (1 1 1) plane exhibits the lowest specific free surface energy among all the lattice planes of silicon, a preferential (1 1 1) orientation was usually observed when crystallizing the amorphous silicon films by CTA [26,27].…”