Morphological study of kinetic roughening on amorphous and microcrystalline silicon surface

Abstract An ex situ study of surface morphology of amorphous (a-Si:H) and microcrystalline silicon ( μ c-Si:H) has been carried out to understand their growth mechanism using an atomic force microscope. For a-Si:H, a standard Karder, Parisi and Zhang (KPZ) model well describes the kinetics of the roughness evolution with increasing film thickness except at T s ∼360°C, where a significant roughness enhancement is observed. The morphology of μ c-Si:H on Si(001) substrate shows a similar roughness formation at much lower temperatures of 150 to 200°C. This roughness formation is found to be correlated with the surface hydrogen coverage.