The Next Generation Showerhead for Advanced Materials

Chanhassen, Minnesota —

Agnitron Technology is introducing its improved close-injection showerhead technology with the introduction of its GEN V showerhead, a next-generation gas delivery platform fabricated using Agnitron’s patented monolithic manufacturing process. Designed to improve reliability, repeatability, and process flexibility, the GEN V showerhead offers excellent thermal-cycling tolerance, maintaining leak integrity even through rapid temperature changes. In its current configuration, the showerhead supports operation up to 150°C, with higher-temperature versions available for custom applications.

Its configurable gas and precursor injection zones allow the design to be tailored for specific epitaxial processes, including oxide, nitride, and transition-metal dichalcogenide (TMD) material growth. Agnitron equips the Agilis MOCVD platforms with this close-injection showerhead technology, while also offering the GEN V showerhead as an upgrade path for legacy MOCVD tools. This allows existing systems to benefit from improved thermal robustness, customizable injection architecture, and enhanced large-area film-thickness uniformity without requiring a full tool replacement. This technology has also been proven to be scalable across reactor sizes, enabling implementation on larger-format reactor platforms.

 The GEN V monolithic showerhead has already been used to grow AlN, AlGaN, AlScN, and β-Ga₂O₃ epitaxial layers with excellent uniformity and material quality. For nitride growth, the GEN V showerhead has demonstrated ~0.3% 1σ thickness uniformity for AlN, AlGaN, and AlScN layers, while AlN/GaN structures have shown film non-uniformity around 1%. Agnitron has also carried out extensive studies on the purity and electrical properties of intentionally doped epitaxial layers and heterostructures grown using the GEN V design. In test AlN structures, residual oxygen and carbon impurity levels were measured at the detection limits of the SIMS equipment at Eurofins.

In addition, AlGaN/GaN 2DEG structures demonstrated sheet charge densities of 1.3 × 10¹³ cm⁻² with room-temperature mobilities of 1700 cm²/V·s. On the oxide side, the GEN V showerhead was installed and tested on the Oxide Agilis 100 system, where it enabled β-Ga₂O₃ epitaxial growth on (010) Ga₂O₃ substrates up to 2 inches in diameter. A 500 nm intentionally Si-doped β-Ga₂O₃ layer, grown using dilute silane to a doping level of 1.2 × 10¹⁸ cm⁻³, showed electron mobility above 100 cm²/V·s, confirming that the showerhead is capable of supporting high-purity device-layer growth. A separate 300 nm β-Ga₂O₃ film showed 0.95% 1σ thickness non-uniformity across a 2-inch wafer. Agnitron also plans to use the GEN V showerhead in its new AFRL-funded Direct to Phase II SBIR project focused on scaling MOCVD growth of AlScN/GaN 2DEG structures.

Patents:
Patent Numbers: US12011764B1 & US12337388B2

Issued Date Respectively: 06/18/2024 & 06/24/2024