Chemical Vapor Deposition of GaAs

Application ID: 945


Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) allows a thin film to be grown on a substrate through molecules and molecular fragments adsorbing and reacting on a surface. This example illustrates the modeling of such a CVD reactor where triethyl-gallium first decomposes, and the reaction products along with arsine (AsH3) adsorb and react on a substrate to form GaAs layers.

The CVD system is modeled using momentum, energy, and mass balances including a detailed description of the gas phase and adsorption kinetics. A reduced reaction scheme is compared to the full scheme in the Reaction Engineering interface.

The model highlights the usability of the Reaction Engineering and Chemistry interfaces together with the Reversible Reaction Group feature for simulation of reaction/transport systems in 0 D and space-dependent reactors. In the Reaction Engineering interface you can easily study the transient behavior of different sets of reactions in a perfectly mixed system. The Chemistry interface collects reaction kinetics and calculates transport and thermal parameters, which can seamlessly be coupled with other interfaces.

In this application, you also utilize the Reversible Reaction Group feature for CHEMKIN import and organization of the complex system of bulk and surface reactions that are involved in the CVD process. The space-dependent model accounts for mass transport, heat transfer and fluid flow in the CVD reactor using the Transport of Diluted Species, Heat Transfer in Fluids, and Laminar Flow interfaces.

This model example illustrates applications of this type that would nominally be built using the following products: