Crystallization in fluorinated and hydrogenated amorphous silicon thin films

The amorphous-to-crystalline (AC) transition of amorphous Si thin films containing fluorine or hydrogen is studied by transmission electron microscopy. The AC transition can be described quantitatively by the incubation time prior to the onset of crystallization t0. This parameter is found to decrease exponentially with temperature with an activation energy of 1.7 eV for a-Si:F and 3.1 eV for a-Si:H:D. It is found that during the crystallization process in a-Si:F the crystallites organize as dendrite single crystals oriented along the 〈110〉 axis perpendicularly to the film surface. a-Si samples that had been covered by Pd or Al crystallize at appreciably lower temperatures. In the case of Al lower activation energies of 0.7 eV for hydrogenated and 0.4 eV for fluorinated a-Si are measured. In the case of Pd/a-Si:H,F for both kinds of a-Si an activation energy of 1.7 eV is found.