ABSTRACTSuicide formation during thermal annealing of thin Pt layers deposited by evaporation onto crystalline silicon substrates was studied by in-situ spectral ellipsometry. As was shown in an earlier study, Pt suicide is formed in a two-step process with intermediate stages of Pt2Si and PtSi at temperatures of about 190 and 240 °C, respectively. We observed a shift of about 15 °C of the di- and monosilicide formation, when the anneal rate was lowered from 3 to 1 K/min. The analysis of the reaction kinetics using the normalized ellipsometric angle δ yields a good fit to the data for different anneal rates with an activation energy of (1.6 ± 0.2) eV. The underlying model of suicide formation through a multilayer system was checked with depth profiles and compositional information obtained from Rutherford Backscattering.
