Flowing Afterglow Vapor Deposition for Microelectric Applications.

The construction of a novel type of plasma assisted chemical vapor deposition device for microelectronic applications has been completed. The machine is based on a flowing afterglow system in which the source generation plasma is physically decoupled from the deposition substrate. Because of the high gas throughout the machine can operate not only as a novel plasma assisted CVD region system, but as a physical deposition device as well. The combination of physical deposition capabilities, versatile plasma capabilities, and nor CVD capabilities, suggests unusual flexibility in the production of high quality insulating films for indium phosphide based microelectronic structures. The achievement of high quality insulating layers on indium phosphide substrates could lead to the development of indium phosphide based metal-insulator-semiconductor MIS devices. The MIS structure might eventually be utilized for very high speed VLSI applications. The devices should be able to achieve operating speeds in the 100GHZ regions and beyond. Initial efforts have thus far proved unsuccessful in obtaining high quality films, although the system the system still shows promise for circumventing the limitation of other deposition techniques.