Polycrystalline Si poly-Si has been introduced into Si integrated circuit technology since the 1970s due to its good electronic properties and its perfect processing compatibility. This material is nowadays applied for many purposes in ultralarge scale integration ULSI technology both in active and passive components. Poly-Si emitter transistors in pure bipolar and in bipolar complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor BiCMOS technology are widely used because of their excellent performance while poly-Si gate MOS field effect transistors MOSFETs have been in the arena since the early 1970s. In general, ULSI device scaling imposes tight control of the poly-Si morphology, ie, the grain size is small compared to the lateral dimensions and to the thicknesses of the layers, in order to improve both performance and reproducibility. Besides ULSI applications, poly-Si may play a major role in the development of activematrix liquid-crystal display AMLCD technology. 1 Integrated AMLCD circuits may be complete ‘‘systems on glass’’in which the entire electronic circuitry is incorporated directly onto the glass substrate. 2 For this purpose, conventional hydrogenated amorphous Si (a-Si: H) thin film transistors TFTs are not adequate due to their limited performance and must be replaced by crystalline Si based TFTs with the requirement of low temperature processing, compatible with low cost glass substrates. 3 For all of these applications precise engineering of the poly-Si grain size, with the aim of controlling the grain boundary and defect density, is a strict requirement. High angle grain boundaries have a profound negative impact on carrier transport due to …