Engineering Research Equipment Grant: Three-Dimensional Video Animation and Imaging for Crystal Growth and Thin Film Research

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9310649 Prasad The equipment will primarily be used for ongoing research on continuous Czochralski (CCZ) crystal growth of silicon single crystals and thin film formation for VLSI/ULSI circuit fabrication. In addition, they may also help in conducting research on liquid encapsulated Czochralski growth of indium phosphide single crystals and in basic melting/solidification research. Computational research and full scale experiments in an industrial crystal puller have demonstrated that the velocity and temperature fields of CCZ growth process are inherently three dimensional and oscillatory except under special circumstances. To understand the physical phenomena underlying the CCZ melt flow and melting of solid pellets when dropped in a rotating pool of melt, and to examine the effect of process parameters on growth conditions, three dimensional visualization and imaging of field variables is necessary. The proposed video photography and image processing equipment, with the help of appropriate software, can perform this task on existing SUN workstations. The video animation of growth processes produced from the computational results, can be used for a theoretical study of the effect of governing parameters as well as for designing new laboratory and industrial experiments. The expanded scope of this research will help in faster development of this CCZ technique for commercial applications. If the crystal growth process can be understood better, it may be possible to grow more perfect crystals at faster rates, resulting in better devices at lower cost.