Analysis of wafer stresses during millisecond thermal processing

A flash lamp has been used to uniformly anneal large wafers with diameters approaching 100 mm. The equipment applies a pulse, with duration of 3-20 ms, resulting in large transient thermal gradients in the wafer. In this paper, we present separate models of the thermal reaction of this process and its effect upon the mechanical behavior, in order to predict stresses and shape changes, and to capture practical phenomenon. We further use the model to follow changes in the expected response consequent on altering process conditions, such as preheating and pulse duration, as well as exploring important issues associated with scaling to large wafer sizes. This work presents an initial description of the thermomechanical response of wafers to flash lamp annealing in the millisecond time regime and is therefore fundamental to the use of this technique in the fabrication of semiconductor devices.