Film growth model of atomic layer deposition for multicomponent thin films

Atomic layer deposition (ALD) has become an essential technique for fabricating nano-scale thin films in the microelectronics industry, and its applications have been extended to multicomponent thin films, as well as to single metal oxide and nitride films. A mathematical film growth model for ALD is proposed to predict the deposition characteristics of multicomponent thin films grown mainly in the transient regime, where the film thickness varies nonlinearly with the number of cycles. The nonlinear behavior of the growth rate and the composition of multicomponent thin films deposited by ALD depend on the precursor used and adsorbing surface. Hence, the equations to describe the change of surface coverage with precursor adsorption and the surface reaction are derived. The area reduction ratio is introduced as a parameter related to the number of adsorbed precursor molecules per unit area. The proposed model was applied to the deposition of Sr-Ti-O thin films to confirm its validity. SrO and TiO2 films were grown separately to investigate their ALD characteristics and to extract model parameters. As a result, it was shown that the thickness and composition of Sr-Ti-O films follow the trend predicted by the proposed model. (C) 2005 American Institute of Physics.