CVD Reactor Configurations
Various configurations have been employed for chemical vapor deposition. We'll consider some of the reactor designs commonly encountered in semiconductor fabrication and related fields:
- horizontal or vertical tube reactors
- showerhead
- high-density plasma
- linear injector
Each design employs different methods for performing the fundamental operations common to all CVD reactors: dispensing gases, controlling temperature, introducing a plasma if desired, and removing byproducts. For each design, we'll perform a simplified transport analysis to get some idea of how gases move around in the system, what regimes the system operates in, and what parameters are likely to be important in determining film deposition rate and uniformity.
We'll also discuss various practical aspects of making the reactors work: how to hold wafers or substrates in place, how to control their temperature, what is easy and hard to do with each reactor configuration.
As an added feature, we’ll include a discussion of a common problem in many processes: how to get a liquid source to become a vapor when that’s what you need.
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