Technology

Hot-wall CVD for highest possible uniformity

In a hot-wall CVD system the reactor chamber is heated by an external power source and the substrate is heated by radiation from the heated chamber walls.

The hot-wall principle offers several advantages, like excellent substrate temperature uniformity and thus uniform coating thickness.

Epiluvac CVD reactors are designed to fully utilize the strengths of the hot-wall and have proven to offer excellent wafer uniformity, especially for Silicon Carbide (SiC) epitaxy where the the company’s engineering team were pioneers in the 1990’s.

There are commonly known challenges with hot-wall reactors. For example there is a risk of deposition on the reactor wall and possible particle contamination requiring frequent cleaning. By innovations relating to the design of the reactor chamber and its gas system, Epiluvac has managed to reduce or even eliminate such problems.

Innovative reactor design

Patented cross-flow design for concentrated growth

  • Gas flow concentrated to the substrate which avoids depletion of the precursor gases.
  • Minimized risk of deposition on the chamber wall and other system parts.

Individually controllable heating zones

  • For optimized cell temperature profiling.
  • Automatic feedback loops

Tuneable gas injection

  • Advanced gas injection makes it possible to adjust the growth rate and doping profile on large wafers.

Automatic hot wafer loader

  • Pre-heating, transfer into the reactor chamber and post-cooling; all handled by the robot.
  • For shortest possible cycle time and high throughput.
  • Minimized temperature cycling extends the liftetime of reactor parts
  • Wafer transfer in a clean inert atmosphere minimizes particle contamination.
  • Pre-loaded wafers for unattended process runs
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Software

  • Manual or recipe mode.
  • Interlocks to prevent user mistakes.
  • Recipe queue for un-attended process runs.
  • Recipes as text files, edit in any text editor.

Epiluvac is a privately held Swedish company founded 2013 by a team of engineers with decades of research and development experience from the CVD reactor field and especially hot-wall CVD epitaxy equipment for Silicon Carbide. Epiluvac provides standard as well as customized reactor solutions and a wide range of service and maintenance packages. Recent customized solutions include reactor designs for graphene and nanowire manufacturing among others.