Abstract
In the cause of the increasing need for miniaturisation of devices, a more sophisticated nano-manufacturing technique of component was rummage around for, which has led to the adoption of atomic layer deposition (ALD) technique due to its competency of accomplishing superb uniformity, conformality, pinhole-free and ultra-thinness. In this dissertation, the ALD process within the cavity and surface of substrate trench was studied numerically with the intent to optimise the deposition process while formulating suitable ALD recipe. In the cause of optimising the process of an atomic layer deposition (ALD) for trenched substrate, a numerical model was presented, and two-dimensional simulations of the ALD process of substrate trenches in an arbitrary reactor were performed. Here, the deposition of aluminium oxide (Al2O3) was illustrated with trimethylaluminum (TMA) and ozone (O3) precursors as Aluminum (Al) and oxygen (O2) sources respectively while inert argon was used as purging gas in an arbitrary reactor. The flow is similar to a typical top-to-bottom type ALD reactor. The gases are assumed to enter at an inlet temperature of 150°C while the substrate, reactor walls and outlet temperature of 250°C is used. The TMA and O3 precursors are both pulsed separately, according to the sequence, into the reactor at 0.085 m/s for 0.2 and 1 second, respectively. While inert-purge gas (Ar) is used to purge the reactor domain at 0.17 m/s for 5 seconds between the pulse and exposure times. For this work the ALD sequence follows in a pulse-exposure-purge-exposure-pulse-exposure-purge manner to form a complete ALD cycle. After the reactive and inert-gases have flown and penetrated into the trenched substrate the excess and by-products are then exhausted past the edges of the trenched substrate towards the outlet of the reactor. The reactor flow domain is meshed into 67023 nodes. The ALD process within the arbitrary reactor is investigated by numerical simulating the reactor using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) within commercial software packages ANSYS FLUENT and CHEMKINPRO. This transient process is implemented by the coupled algorithm approach...
M.Ing. (Mechanical Engineering)