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.