Nickel Induced Lateral Crystallization (NILC) is a promising technology for making a low cost, large area and high quality silicon thin film. A several of studies related to the optimization, application and characterization have been done in order to be comparable with respect to the SOI technology....[ Read more ]

Nickel Induced Lateral Crystallization (NILC) is a promising technology for making a low cost, large area and high quality silicon thin film. A several of studies related to the optimization, application and characterization have been done in order to be comparable with respect to the SOI technology.

In this thesis, the mechanism of the NILC process is provided to support the proposed ideas with several experiments. Then, I focus on the study on two areas. One is the uniformity and other is process time. The purposes are to study the uniformity of two layers TFT, to improve the uniformity of film quality by the control of Nickel seed, to reduce the process time by using pulsed rapid thermal annealing in NILC process and to reduce the characterization time by using spreading resistance probe measurement in NILC film characterization.

In conclusion, the results are predictable. It is feasible to use NILC technology on 3-D device fabrication by the results of 2 layers TFT with a small variation (or good uniformity) of field effect mobility and threshold voltage. The control of Nickel seed distribution can confine the grain position to improve the film uniformity. The use of pulsed rapid thermal annealing is able to shorten the annealing time in comparison with constant temperature annealing. The results of spreading resistance probe measurement shows the reliability on comparison of NILC films formed by different experimental conditions in order to shorten the characterization time. These results are very helpful to broaden the use of NILC in thin film technology.