Modeling Interaction in Nanowire Growth Process Toward Improved Yield

Research on nanowire growth with patterned arrays of catalyst has shown that wire-to-wire spacing is an important factor affecting nanowire quality. To improve the process yield and the length uniformity of fabricated nanowires, it is important to reduce the resource competition between nanowires during the growth process. In this paper, we propose a physical-statistical nanowire-interaction model considering the shadowing effect and shared substrate diffusion area to determine the optimal pitch that would ensure the minimum competition between nanowires. A sigmoid function is used in the model, and the method of least squares is used to estimate the model parameters. The estimated model is then used to determine the optimal spatial arrangement of catalyst arrays. This work is an early attempt at the physical-statistical modeling of selective nanowire growth for the improvement of process yield. Note to Practitioners - This paper was motivated by the problem of how to determine the optimal pitch in a patterned nanowire growth process to reduce resource competition between nanowires during the growth process. Existing approaches generally deal with such problems through experiments, and most of them neglect the impact of competition on the growth yield. This paper proposes a physical-statistical approach to model the interaction between nanowires during growth and determine the optimal pitch. It should be noted that in some applications specific density or other requirements must be satisfied.