Thermal Radiative Properties of v Nanoscale Semiconductors with vv Incoherent Formulation

Rapid thermal processing (RTP) has become a key technology for semiconductor device manufacturing in a variety of applications, such as thermal oxidation, annealing, and thin-film growth. Hence, understanding the radiative properties of silicon and other relevant materials is essential for the analysis of the thermal transport processes. We have analyzed and calculated the spectral, directional and temperature dependency of radiative properties of a three layers material using transfer-matrix method. In the present work empirical expressions for calculating the optical constants of materials are carefully selected. The studied examples using silicon wafer and either silicon dioxide or silicon nitride coating demonstrate the strong influence of coating and coating thickness on the radiative properties. This study helps to gain a better understanding of the radiative properties of semitransparent wafers with different coatings and will have an impact not only on semiconductor processing but also on thin film solar cells. Results showed that silicon dioxide coating has higher reflectance than silicon nitride coating for visible wavelengths. Therefore coatings act as wavelength selective emitters for radiative energy conversion and thermal radiation detection. In visible wavelengths the reflectance increases as the temperature increases, because of decreasing emittance but in infrared wavelengths the reflectance and transmittance decrease as the temperature increases. The layer thicknesses need to be optimized to achieve maximum transmittance for the given materials. Maximum transmittance also depends on the type of materials and its temperature.