Formation and characterization of thick single crystalline silicon films on oxidized silicon wafers.

From the early 1960's to the present, the Dielectric Isolation (D.I.) technology has been the only commercial process available for producing thick (10-100 micron) Si films on oxidized Si wafers for use in making high voltage and radiation-hardened devices. However, this process is tedious and costly. Recently, a new procedure was reported for producing the same structure using lamp recrystallization, called the LEGO (lateral epitaxial growth over oxide) process. The LEGO process was developed in this study as a technology yielding device-worthy thick single crystal Si films for planar, and (with certain limitations) non-planar structures. The LEGO process produces single crystal films by melting a poly-Si layer on an oxidized Si wafer and allowing it to resolidify from seed windows reaching into the base Si wafer. In this thesis aspects of both the growth process and the quality of the LEGO grown films were investigated.