Articles you may be interested inHighly textured growth of AlN films on sapphire by magnetron sputtering for high temperature surface acoustic wave applications J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A 29, 021010 (2011); 10.1116/1.3551604 Microstructure and chemical wet etching characteristics of AlN films deposited by ac reactive magnetron sputtering J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A 28, 69 (2010); 10.1116/1.3268620 Effects of deposition parameters on the structure of AlN coatings grown by reactive magnetron sputtering J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A 25, 557 (2007); 10.1116/1.2730513Highly c -axis oriented thin AlN films deposited on gold seed layer for FBAR devices Aluminum nitride thin films were deposited by reactive high power impulse magnetron sputtering (HiPIMS) and pulsed direct-current on Si (100) and textured Mo substrates, where the same deposition conditions were used for both techniques. The films were characterized by x-ray diffraction and atomic force microscopy. The results show a pronounced improvement in the AlN crystalline texture for all films deposited by HiPIMS on Si. Already at room temperature, the HiPIMS films exhibited a strong preferred (002) orientation and at 400 C, no contributions from other orientations were detected. Despite the low film thickness of only 200 nm, an x-scan full width at half maximum value of 5.1 was achieved on Si. The results are attributed to the high ionization of sputtered material achieved in HiPIMS. On textured Mo, there was no significant difference between the deposition techniques.

Titanium nitride (TiN) films have been grown on Si (100) substrates by DC. reactive magnetron sputtering from a titanium (Ti) metallic target at different nitrogen partial pressures (80–10 sccm) and different power (500–1500 W). The effects of the nitrogen pressure and power on structural and electrical properties of TiN films were investigated by measuring their X‐ray diffraction (crystal orientation), Atomic Force Microscopy (surface roughness), four‐probe technique (electrical resistivity) and film thickness. It is show that deposition rate (13–65 nm/min) decrease with an increase of nitrogen pressure. The films have the grain size (0.001–0.027 μm2) along the sample surface and the size of the grain increase with an increase of nitrogen partial pressure. The X‐ray diffraction measurement show that films were crystalline (with preferred orientation (311)), but some of them were polycrystalline ((311) and (111) preferred orientation). These films have been used as gate electrodes in MOS capacitors, which were fabricated with TiN and SiNxOy as gate electrode and dielectric, respectively. With 20 minutes of annealing time, the extracted TiN work function and flat‐band voltage were about 4.65 eV and ‐0.29 V, which indicates that TiN can be used as mig‐gap electrode for MOS technology. (© 2012 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)