Novel UV-assisted Rapid Thermal Annealing of Ferroelectric Materials

This chapter presents a paper that describes a novel processing technique termed Ultra Violet Rapid Thermal Processing (UV-RTP), which is used for reduced temperature crystallization of ferroelectric thin-films. These materials are attracting major research interest in applications, such as pyroelectric sensors and micro-electromechanical systems because of their superior properties. Furnaces and RTP units find a wide range of application in semi-conductor manufacturing, such as oxidation, nitridation, annealing, and glass-reflow processing. Although conventional furnace technology has been established for much longer than RTP technology, RTP has a number of attractive features, which offer advantages over furnace processing. There is no time delay in heating and cooling in RTP. Additionally, the lower-thermal budget of an RTP system means that even a single-wafer system can have competitive throughput. It is the associated rapid temperature ramp that is of most interest in the area of ferroelectric materials development. Ferroelectrics are materials that have a spontaneous electric polarisation, the direction of which can be reversed by the application of an external electric field. They display dielectric properties, along with piezoelectric and pyroelectric properties.