A novel cold-walled, lamp-heated, ultrahigh vacuum chemical vapor deposition (UHV/CVD) batch system for the growth of SiGe layers is presented. This system combines the batch capability of the standard UHV/CVD furnace with the temperature processing available in rapid thermal processing (Rm) equipment. The first results are very encouraging : germanium contents up to 30% and boron doping levels up to 5 x 10(18) cm(-3) have been obtained. The uniformity of the film thickness is around 10% both across a single wafer and through the boat load, Different surface passivation schemes were investigated using excess carrier lifetime measurements. These measurements show that diluted HF provides much better surface passivation than buffered HF.