Kyle E. Litz

Nucleation of chemical vapor deposited silicon nitride on silicon dioxide

We have studied the early stages of silicon nitride chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on silicon dioxide using medium energy ion scattering. The growth mode consists of island nucleation followed by coalescence. Similar behavior is observed for films grown using different precursors and reactor environments, indicating that the growth mode is caused by the fundamental nonwetting nature of the nitride/oxide interface under the conditions used for CVD.

THE ROLE OF SECOND-NEIGHBOR EFFECTS IN PHOTOEMISSION : ARE SILICON SURFACES AND INTERFACES SPECIAL?

A widely used assignment scheme for Si 2p core-level photoemission studies of silicon oxidation relies solely on the formal oxidation state of the silicon. The tacit assumption of this assignment methodology is that second-neighbor effects have no measurable effect on observed Si 2p binding energies. In this letter, new experiments are combined with literature precedents to make the case that the second-neighbor effects play an important role in determining binding energy shifts.