Modeling the growth of thin silicon oxide films on silicon

This article analyses the validity of the widely used semi-empirical oxidation models based on the Deal-Grove formulation in the light of recent advances in the understanding of the oxidation process. An extension of the Deal-Grove formulation is suggested to account for the newest experimental results. The introduced extension incorporates the effect of accelerated initial growth into the theoretical oxidation growth model. There is a direct relationship between the newly-derived theoretical term for the initial growth rate and its widely-used empirical counterpart. (C) 1996 American Institute of Physics.