Effect of nickel in large grain poly-Si film formed by nickel induced lateral crystallization and new grain enhancement method

Large grain poly-silicon film (poly-Si) with high material quality and uniformity can have numerous novel applications such as providing a low cost alternative to form silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrates and a breakthrough technology to ultra-dense 3-dimensional multi-layer SOI like devices and circuits. Nickel Induced Lateral Crystallization (NILC) of amorphous Si (a-Si) has been studied intensively, yet the grains are still small (∼ 1 μm). Recently, we have reported a novel method by combining NILC and a new annealing (at above 900 °C) to form poly-Si film with very large grains ranging from 10 μm to 100 μm. The film has good quality and the TFTs formed are highly comparable to SOI TFTs. This work further reports the effect of Ni to the new large-grain poly-Si film