Lasers Solutions for Annealing

The application of lasers for annealing of wafer-based and thin-film microelectronic devices is steadily increasing. Excellent control of material characteristics (for example, dopant activation profile) can be achieved through proper selection of laser parameters, such as wavelength, pulse duration and fluence, which directly influence the laser material interaction. In this paper, we present several lasers and optical systems from Coherent that have proven to be useful for annealing in both microelectronic and macroelectronic applications. These laser systems include Excimer Lasers in the ultraviolet and our unique high-power continuous-wave laser system that delivers scalable output power of multiple hundreds of Watts in the visible wavelength range. We will present results from recent work involving dopant activation, and will present several application examples from Flat Panel Display annealing and crystallization, which we propose are directly applicable to wafer-based microelectronics as well.