Hot Wire Chemical Vapor Deposition: Recent Progress, Present State of the Art and Competitive Opportunities

Abstract

Hot Wire CVD (also called Catalytic CVD or initiated CVD) is an elegant low pressure deposition technique for the deposition of functional films, both inorganic and organic, based on the decomposition of precursor sources at a heated metallic surface. The conformal deposition of thin films on rigid substrates or flexible foil substrates, whether in-line or batch type, is very straightforward, since it is plasma-free (i.e. without the risk of a damaging bombardment of energetic ions) and it is easily scalable. An increasing variety of thin film materials can be obtained with this method, with good feedstock gas utilization and high deposition rate. Progress has been made in establishing stable and reproducible conditions for the hot catalytic wires used for efficient decomposition of the source gases. In this paper we discuss some of the current research issues in this field.

Hot-wire chemical vapor deposition low-loss hydrogenated amorphous silicon waveguides for silicon photonic devices

“…PECVD has been widely reported for the deposition of a-Si:H waveguides [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12], and the optical propagation losses are summarized and compared to this work in Table 1. Hot-wire chemical vapor deposition (HWCVD), also known as Cat-CVD, has been used to deposit a-Si:H, micro-crystalline silicon (μc-Si:H), and polycrystalline silicon for photovoltaic and thin film transistor applications [23]. Previous work performed by Takahiro et al [24] demonstrated a waveguide loss of 15 dB/cm at a wavelength of 800 nm.…”

Defect termination on crystalline silicon surfaces by hydrogen for improvement in the passivation quality of catalytic chemical vapor-deposited SiNx and SiNx/P catalytic-doped layers

“…Catalytic CVD (Cat-CVD), often also referred to as hotwire CVD, is one of the potential methods to overcome the drawback of PECVD. 9,10) Radical species are formed by the decomposition of source gas molecules on a heated catalyzing wire in Cat-CVD. c-Si surfaces are thus not exposed to energetic ions, and good film=c-Si interface properties can be realized.…”

Fabrication and doping of silicon micropillar arrays for solar light harvesting

“…[71,72] Hot-wire chemical vapor deposition (HWCVD), also referred to as catalytic CVD, is used for the deposition of mainly inorganic thin films. [73,74] During the deposition under vacuum, a precursor source is heated by a metallic filament to obtain conformal thin films on various substrates, for example nanostructured silicon. [75] By combining the precursor with the desired dopant molecules, shallow junctions can be formed, as shown by several different research groups.…”