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Concept
Atomic layer deposition
Summary
Atomic layer deposition (ALD) is a thin-film deposition technique based on the sequential use of a gas-phase chemical process; it is a subclass of chemical vapour deposition. The majority of ALD reactions use two chemicals called precursors (also called "reactants"). These precursors react with the surface of a material one at a time in a sequential, self-limiting, manner. A thin film is slowly deposited through repeated exposure to separate precursors. ALD is a key process in fabricating semiconductor devices, and part of the set of tools for synthesising nanomaterials.
During atomic layer deposition, a film is grown on a substrate by exposing its surface to alternate gaseous species (typically referred to as precursors or reactants). In contrast to chemical vapor deposition, the precursors are never present simultaneously in the reactor, but they are inserted as a series of sequential, non-overlapping pulses. In each of these pulses the precursor molecules react with the surface in a self-limiting way, so that the reaction terminates once all the available sites on the surface are consumed. Consequently, the maximum amount of material deposited on the surface after a single exposure to all of the precursors (a so-called ALD cycle) is determined by the nature of the precursor-surface interaction. By varying the number of cycles it is possible to grow materials uniformly and with high precision on arbitrarily complex and large substrates.
ALD is a deposition method with great potential for producing very thin, conformal films with control of the thickness and composition of the films possible at the atomic level. A major driving force for the recent interest is the prospective seen for ALD in scaling down microelectronic devices according to Moore's law. ALD is an active field of research, with hundreds of different processes published in the scientific literature, though some of them exhibit behaviors that depart from that of an ideal ALD process.
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