| AVS 56th International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| Thin Film | Monday Sessions |
| Session TF3-MoA |
| Session: | Energy Applications and Scaling |
| Presenter: | D.H. Levy, Eastman Kodak Company |
| Authors: | D.H. Levy, Eastman Kodak Company S.F. Nelson, Eastman Kodak Company M.S. Burberry, Eastman Kodak Company L.W. Tutt, Eastman Kodak Company R.S. Kerr, Eastman Kodak Company G. Zwadlo, Eastman Kodak Company |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) has proven itself in the fabrication of high-quality films with good uniformity and thickness control. ALD films serve as barriers, surface treatments, dielectrics, and semiconductors. The process has numerous benefits including superior conformality and ease of selective patterning, attributes that make it an ideal tool for upcoming needs in nanofabrication.
To date much of the usefulness of ALD has been demonstrated in enclosed systems where the gases used to effect the deposition are delivered and removed from a chamber in a timed sequence. An alternative to this approach is to keep gas flows of the various reactants at steady state but confined to specific regions of a coating head. Movement of the substrate relative to the coating head yields the required alternating exposure sequence. This method, termed spatial ALD (S-ALD), relies upon methods to isolate closely spaced gas streams. The design approaches to eliminate reactant mixing and to produce good uniformity will be described. Successful gas manipulation has the benefit that not only can reaction gases be isolated from each other, but also these gases can be isolated from the surrounding environment to allow for open-air operation. Because there is no containment chamber and operation occurs at atmospheric pressure, S-ALD is well suited to large and ultimately continuous substrates, such as a moving web.
The use of S-ALD to deposit films onto a range of substrates, both rigid and flexible, as well as webs, will be discussed. The ALD process also allows selective film growth by prepatterning substrates with growth inhibitors. These inhibitors can be applied to flexible substrates with conventional printing techniques. By leveraging selective area deposition, we combine the high quality of ALD films with printing-like patterning, all at atmospheric pressure. This combination is likely a key step in enabling high-quality printed electronics onto flexible substrates.
The performance of films deposited by the S-ALD approach will also be presented, functioning as barriers and components in patterned semiconductor devices. In general, performance of S-ALD films in terms of electrical and physical properties are consistent with the published performance of conventional ALD materials.