Annealing System

Laser Annealing System

Laser annealing is the modification of the surface layer such as an amorphous Si film formed on a wafer or glass substrate to poly-Si by laser. Annealing system using solid-state laser has little downtime and supports system from 4 inch wafer to G6 substrate.

Laser annealing is the process of quikly melting and cooling the surface layer of an amorphous silicon thin film with a pulse laser to crystallize it to modify it into a polysilicon thin film. In industrial applications, it is used in the process of reforming amorphous silicon into polysilicon in the flat panel display process. ELA using excimer laser was the mainstream, but we moved to solid green laser system with low running cost. However, while the particle size distribution of polysilicon produced by a green laser is sufficient for high resolution LCD TFTs, the particle size and regularity of OLED TFTs have not met the requirements. Therefore, a system (UV-SLA) that uses a UV solid-state laser with a wavelength of 343 nm has been developed for OLED TFT. The UV-SLA process provides a uniform particle size distribution due to multi-shot absorption during scanning.

By using UV-SLA, laser annealing with a flat top profile with a large DoF like the profile on the left can be performed. By using this top flat profile, high-speed scanning of 20 mm / s and periodic pattern structure (LIPPS) of poly-Si thin film can be obtained. Since the speed can increase the production tact time, the periodic pattern structure contributes to the speed improvement of the device. UV-SLA enables high throughput and low cost of ownership (40-50% of ELA).

The photo on the left is a SEM image of a thin film after laser annealing in which amorphous silicon is poly-siliconized with a flat top profile by VOLCANO®100UV SLA, a system that uses a UV solid-state laser. Each cell has an irregular shape, but has a regular grain structure as a whole. This period is almost equal to the wavelength of 343 nm of UV solid state laser.