Kinetic mechanism of silicon epitaxial growth from chlorosilanes.

The chemical kinetic aspects involved in epitaxial silicon deposition from chlorosilanes are here addressed. A pathway involving both gas phase and surface elementary reactions was derived, using the rate parameters for most of the involved reaction steps taken from the literature. The mechanism was tested and refined through quantum chemical calculations evidencing the most important reactions underlying the growth of the film. Particularly, the role of etching and desorption reactions was addressed. To test the mechanism against experimental growth rate and composition data it was embedded into a ID reactor model where the precursor transport was simulated through the boundary layer theory.