Analysis of rapid dry oxidation of silicon

By analyzing the most recent models on rapid initial oxidation and the experimental data at low temperatures we prove unambiguously that neither enhanced nor retarded oxygen diffusion nor any kind of additional oxygen transport flux can account for anomalous initial regime of silicon dry oxidation.The rapid growth is mainly due to the enhanced oxygen solubility and partly to the enhancement of the reaction rate constantk_s. We argue that the reaction rate depends linearly on the oxygen solubility for low solubilities pertinent to dry oxidation but that it saturates at high solubilities characteristic for the wet oxidation.