Silica film preparation by chemical vapor deposition using vacuum ultraviolet excimer lamps

Summary form only given. We have developed a new scheme to fabricate silica film coatings on the basis of a photochemical vapor deposition method with five different excimer lamps which emit incoherent light from 126 nm to 308 nm in VUV to UV spectral region. The VUV photons have the ability to dissociate tetraethoxyorthosilicate molecules to generate Si-O fragments and have resulted in SiO/sub 2/ film deposition on such substrates as sapphire, crystal quartz and silicon wafers at room temperature. FTIR spectra taken from SiO/sub 2/ films prepared with five different excimer lamps indicate that the photons from Xe/sub 2/ (172 nm=7.9 eV), Kr/sub 2/ (146 nm=8.5 eV) and Ar/sub 2/ (126 nm=9.8 eV) excimers induce SiO/sub 2/ film preparation, but the photons from KrCl (222 nm=5.5 eV) and XeCl (308 nm=4.0 eV) excimers do not.