Analysis of gallium arsenide deposition in a horizontal chemical vapor deposition reactor using massively parallel computations

A numerical analysis of the deposition of gallium arsenide from trimethylgallium (TMG) and arsine in a horizontal CVD reactor with tilted susceptor and a 3 " diameter rotating substrate is performed. The three-dimensional model includes complete coupling between fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and species transport, and is solved using an unstructured finite element discretization on a massively parallel computer. A reaction mechanism consisting of three surface and two bulk species, four surface reactions, and four gas phase species was used to model the deposition. The effects of three operating parameters (the disk rotation rate, inlet TMG fraction, and inlet velocity) and two design parameters (the tilt angle of the reactor base and the reactor width) on the growth rate and uniformity are presented. The nonlinear dependence of the growth rate uniformity on the key operating parameters is discussed in detail. Efficient and robust algorithms for massively parallel reacting flow simulations, as incorporated into our analysis code MFSalsa, make detailed analysis of this complicated system feasible. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.