The augmented saddle field discharge characteristics and its applications for plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition

A high ion flux parallel electrode plasma is proposed and studied in its DC configuration. By cascading a diode source region which supplies electrons and a saddle field region where these seed electrons are energized and amplified, the energy of ion bombardment on the substrate can be decoupled from the plasma density. The sufficiently large density of electrons and holes in the vicinity of the substrate raises the possibility to perform plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition on insulating materials, at low sheath voltages (around 40 V in the configuration studied), at low temperatures in which the surface mobility of film growth species may be provided by the bombardment of moderate energy ions. As a benchmarking exercise, experiments are carried out on silane discharge characteristics and deposition of hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) on both silicon wafer and glass. The films grown at low anode voltages have excellent microstructures with predominantly monohydride bonds, sharp band tails, but relatively high integrated defect density in the mid 1016/cm3 range for the particular substrate temperature of 180 °C, indicating that further optimizations are necessary if the electrode configuration is to be used to create a-Si:H devices.