Enhancing epitaxial SixC1 − x deposition by adding Ge

In this work, a possible way to enhance the epitaxial growth of metastable, tensile strained SixC1 − x layers by the addition of germanium is demonstrated. During ultra-high vacuum chemical vapor deposition growth, the co-mixing of germane to the SixC1 − x precursors was found to enhance the growth rate by a factor of ~ 3 compared to the growth of pure SixC1 − x. Furthermore, an increase of the amount of substitutional incorporated carbon has been observed. Selective SixGeyC1 − x − y deposition processes utilizing a cyclic deposition were developed to integrate epitaxial tensile strained layers into source and drain areas of n-channel transistors.