Metal induced crystallization: Gold versus aluminium

In this work metal induced crystallization was studied using aluminium and gold deposited over 150 nm amorphous silicon films grown by LPCVD. Aluminium and gold layers with thickness between 1 and 5 nm were deposited on the silicon films and after that, the samples were annealed at 500◦C from 5 up to 30 h. When the crystallization is induced through a gold layer, the Si crystalline fraction is higher than when using aluminium. For samples crystallized for 30 h at 500◦C with 2 nm of metal a crystalline fraction of 57.5% was achieved using gold and only 38.7% when using aluminium. C 2005 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc.