Unmet Need: Homogeneous doping is hard to achieve by traditional methods
Crystal growth using conventional methods such as Czochralski (CZ), often suffer from core breakdown and low uniformity. This was shown especially for those crystals grown with low temperature gradients and those grown from highly viscous melts, in which natural convection does not provide enough stirring and forced convection is necessary.
The Technology: Can grow high quality homogeneously doped single crystals
This invention implements ACRT in Czochralski or vertical crystal pulling technique apparatuses to grow homogeneously doped single crystal from the melt with dopant concentration being similar to the composition of initial charge, adjustable dopant concentration that can be equal to the initial concentration in the melt, and free of core breakdown and associated stresses. Crystals grown using the disclosed invention have homogeneous doping with adjustable dopant concentration, which is not achievable for crystals grown with conventional methods.
Applications:
• Improve current ACRT or vertical crystal pulling technique
Advantages:
• Enhance crystal homogeneity
• Do not have core breakdown problem, increasing yield up to 100%.
• Easy to be implemented
• Versatile, easy to be implemented to various dopants
Patent Information:
US patent application filed.