Formation of regularly arranged large grain silicon islands by using embedded micro mirrors in the flash crystallization of amorphous silicon

The well-controlled formation of large silicon grains on predetermined positions is a key issue in order to produce single-grain thin film transistors on insulating substrates and thus to enable monolithic 3D integration. One way to achieve this is to artificially control the solidification of molten silicon during the flash crystallization of amorphous silicon. In this work, we present such an approach in which we used patterned metal layers below the amorphous silicon. The metal spots act as embedded micro mirrors and consequently introduce a lateral temperature gradient into the silicon film during flash crystallization. As a result, the grain growth from molten silicon is seeded from the predefined regions with the lowest temperature and thus the formation of large crystal silicon islands proceeds in a controlled manner. In the scope of this study, we evaluated a variety of different mirror patterns with respect to their suitability for this approach and observed that patterns of both circular and line-shaped mirrors are the most promising variants. The resulting silicon islands have pillow-like shapes and are located exclusively in regions between neighboring mirrors. They exhibit dimensions of a few tens of micrometers and consist of grains with sizes up to 28 µm. The formation of single-grain silicon pillow-like structures was observed for particular mirror patterns having circular mirrors. On the other hand, the application of mirror patterns with line-shaped mirrors resulted in the formation of elongated silicon grains which we explained in terms of lateral solidification starting from one edge. Furthermore, this approach exhibits grain filter characteristics leading to the controlled growth of large single grains at predetermined positions.